The contentious negotiations over the fate of the North American Free Trade Agreement have veered into one of the world’s most pressing health issues: fighting obesity.
Urged on by big American food and soft-drink companies, the Trump administration is using the trade talks with Mexico and Canada to try to limit the ability of the pact’s three members — including the United States — to warn consumers about the dangers of junk food, according to confidential documents outlining the American position.
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Officials in Mexico and Canada — along with governments in Brazil, Peru, Uruguay, Argentina and Colombia — are discussing options like the use of colors, shapes and other easy-to-understand symbols that warn consumers of health risks. They were inspired in large part by Chile’s introduction of stringent regulations in 2016 that include requirements for black stop-sign warnings on the front of some packages.
But the Office of the United States Trade Representative, which is leading the Nafta talks on the American side, is trying to head off the momentum. It is pushing to limit the ability of any Nafta member to require consumer warnings on the front of sugary drinks and fatty packaged foods, according to a draft of the proposal reviewed by The New York Times.
The American provision seeks to prevent any warning symbol, shape or color that “inappropriately denotes that a hazard exists from consumption of the food or nonalcoholic beverages.”
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In most cases, trade law allows governments to retain the right to make rules in the interest of public health, experts say, but the proposal by the United States appears to be aimed at curbing that.
Ms. Jones of the George Institute said research found that trade policy had also been used to try to block efforts to adopt warnings in Ecuador, Peru, Thailand, Chile and Indonesia. Chile has moved forward as has Ecuador, but with a less aggressive labeling system, Ms. Jones said.
Thailand and Indonesia “appear to have been deterred,” she said, adding, “We call this ‘regulatory chill.’”
I would be surprised if NAFTA goes further than the WTO or other FTAs in terms of requiring that product labelling be science-based or no more trade-restrictive than necessary, so I suspect this is just a misunderstanding of the U.S. proposal, or perhaps the result of some reporters talking only to trade critics and not to practicing trade lawyers. But in case anyone knows more about what is being proposed here, and there is actually something to it, I'd love to hear about it.
The issue came up at today's House Ways & Means Committee hearing with Ambassador Lighthizer (about an hour into it), but there wasn't much clarification about what exactly this proposed NAFTA provision says.
