Economics and politics of food standards, trade, and development

Standards have played an important role in food trade for a very long time. Their rapid growth in recent years has triggered vigorous debates on their impacts on international trade and development, with many arguing that standards are " non-tariff barriers" to trade and that standards are marginalizing the poor. I present conceptual frameworks and review empirical evidence on the equity and efficiency effects and the political economy of standards. Models which incorporate essential aspects of standards yield complex theoretical results and nuanced conclusions. Careful empirical analyses support such nuanced arguments and find complex effects. For trade, standards can create welfare gains but also involve rent redistribution which induces lobbying by interest groups to set the standards at their preferred level. This makes it difficult to distinguish socially desirable standards from those resulting from political rent-seeking. For development, it is crucial to explicitly account for (a) the endogeneity of the institutional organization of value chains and (b) both smallholder contracting and employment creation on large scale farms when considering the impact of standards on development and poverty.