Among other provisions in last year’s Magnitsky Act, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative must send an annual report to Congress judging Russia’s performance as a World Trade Organization member.
The first such report is out, and at least in terms of agriculture, the results aren’t looking very good.
When it became a member of the WTO, Russia agreed to two separate agricultural agreements, the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures, and the WTO Agreement on Agriculture. The former gives WTO members the freedom to establish their own measures to protect human, animal and plant life or health. Unsurprisingly, the measures have to be based on international standards, supported by science, and cannot constitute a disguised trade restriction. Russia agreed to it all.
One of the main examples given in the report of Russia’s failure to keep its WTO commitments is in its zero-tolerance policy for the leanness additive ractopamine, a policy that since February has effectively banned all U.S. pork and beef from the country.
Together, American pork and beef exports to Russia in 2012 represented more than half a billion dollars, according to government data compiled by the U-S Meat Export Federation. Specifically, it represented a $307 million value for beef and a $282 million value for pork last year.
A zero-tolerance level of ractopamine is more stringent than maximum residue level allowed by United Nations’s Codex Alimentarius food standards, and more importantly, Russia has not produced a risk assessment justifying the strictness of its measures.
The USTR report is light on what, exactly, the U.S. Trade Representative’s office is doing to correct this, only stating that
We continue to raise our concerns about Russia’s risk assessments both bilaterally and in the W-T-O.
On Christmas day, U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul told a Russian newspaper that the ban on imported meat products has cost the U.S. between $5-$6 billion since it entered into force in February.
