Overview of Foreign Technical Barriers to U.S. Agricultural Exports

Technical barriers affecting agricultural trade are emerging at the center of agricultural trade policy debates with increased frequency. These bathers include sanitary and phytosanitary measures; measures to prevent commercial fraud, such as standards of identity and standards of measure; consumer measures, which regulate food quality attributes; trade measures aimed at protecting the global commons; and others. Although many international trade experts in the public and the private sectors concur that technical barriers are a significant impediment to agricultural trade, evidence in support of this view has primarily been anecdotal. This report aims to provide the first general overview of technical barriers that currently confront U.S: agricultural exports. It presents summary descriptive statistics of foreign technical barriers developed from a survey of USDA's foreign attaches and representatives from agricultural producer groups who identified more than 300 measures in 63 foreign markets, and estimated that these technical barriers threatened, constrained, or blocked $4.97 billion of U.S. exports in 1996.