Visiting for a one-off is different from a continued diet. And you still risk exposure to different things. The regimes between the US, Canada, the EU etc are close enough for various foreign offices not to issue travel warnings to tourists, but it is still sensible and necessary, for the sake of public health and accountability, for products entering a country to be inspected for deviation.
Of course, the other thing is, according to WTO rules, if the UK, or the US, or any country declared it was going to open its border to foreign goods without customs checks, it has to do that for every country in the world. You can’t just say American goods come in Scot-free and no others.
Either people can argue that the safety standards in the EU are too strict, or they can argue that all developed countries have basically the same, and there’s no real difference. The argument for dropping EU standards relies on them being stricter, so it’s pretty daft to then argue for that by saying they’re all the same.
Incidentally, the US is one of the countries that allows the use of sulphur dioxide on fresh fruit. That’s a difference right there, between two ‘modern’ countries, that could cause anaphalaxis in some people if they don’t know which standard was used. For what benefit?
I’m just not seeing it. The two countries (like the EU states) are sufficiently friendly that we are not going to allow tainted items to be shipped to other countries. The businessman who puts antifreeze in his wine will soon be out of business and criminally prosecuted.
Further, it is not like the US and Canada inspection agencies won’t have access to the issues in each country. If we had a repeat of the Romaine Lettuce problem that we had a few months ago, the Canadian agencies would know to pull U.S. Romaine off the shelves at once, even if we did try to poison them with it.
If U.S. standards on chicken processing are not up to par with Canadian standards, then the Canadian government can advise people not to purchase U.S. chicken and those that rightfully observe that the 320 million Americans who are exposed to U.S. chicken seem to be doing fine, then they can eat it.
Again, we are not talking about Libertarian, no standards, buyer beware capitalism. We are talking about first world nations with effective inspection laws. I could see your point if we were talking about allowing food from Venezuela to be placed in the market.
I’m simply not seeing the issue between having different, yet by all rational thought, similar standards to be allowed, with labeling, and with free consumer choice. It seems overly paternalistic. Let’s say that Canada allows chemical X to be put in its product Y, but I really love Canadian Y. The government tells me I cannot have it because chemical X is too dangerous for me. Well, a lot of things are dangerous. The government doesn’t stop me from drinking whiskey for breakfast or smoking 4 packs a day, but it wants to hamper that choice? It seems so minor in comparison.
That seems absurd. How does the EU get away with it?
I believe Malden is talking about the concept of Most Favoured Nation which WTO requires its members to accord one another. If the US or the UK left the WTO, then they would not need to abide by MFN.
A free trade area is explicitly excepted from the rules. At least, that’s what I understand from the first section of this page.
What this discussion shows, if nothing else, is that trade and trade rules are extremely complicated, and attempting to arbitrarily and unilaterally change them will cause a lot of problems, at least in the short term.
So why couldn’t two countries establish a “free trade area” and circumvent the rules?
I hope nobody thinks that I don’t agree with the objectives of the EU. I think that they are absolutely reasonable and beneficial, but can be done in ways other than the heavy handed rule from Brussels.
If it wasn’t for this heavy handedness there would be no call for Brexit. Have open borders, have free trade, have the same currency for those countries that want to have it, but I don’t see the need to oversee the internal workings of each member state. If you think that British meat is infested with rat doots, then put out a communique that the EU does not recommend eating British meat because of the high level of rat doots it contains, link the relevant studies, require labeling, and let the consumer decide if he/she wants to roll the dice, take the same chance that all British citizens take, and eat British meat. (No snickering! 
)
They can, that’s what the EU started as. The US, Canada and Mexico have one as well. But if the UK leaves the EU without such an agreement, then both them and us will be required to trade on WTO terms, and as it currently stands there has been no deal agreed.
There are several better options than leaving with no agreement - but none of them have majority support at the moment, which means that in 2 months we will leave by default, and any arrangements made to ease trade between the UK and EU will also apply to trade with anywhere else. So, to use your earlier example, we wopuld have to accept Venezuelan meat.
I actually think that this is less complex than it appears, it’s just that there’s an element of breathtaking stupidy in the UK that makes it hard to believe that they would allow it to happen.
n/m
At the simplest level, no one wants a free trade deal with somewhere they think has lower standards than their own country. It’s lose-lose for the place with higher standards- they get their home produced stuff undercut in price, but still have to deal with any issues caused by use of items made with lower standards.
And realistically, the end consumer often is not going to get a choice. They’ll get what the supplier thought they could sell, which will be the local majority choice, chosen by the 99.9% of people who are not going to read the relevant studies and meaningfully evaluate the risks. Doing your shopping safely should not require a PhD. That’s why we have government agencies that evaluate the risk on countrywide level. Given that national decisions regarding standards have been made and would continue to be made on products under your proposed systems, why would any country want to then ignore those decisions and allow products that don’t meet those standards in?
With the greatest of respect, I think you are underestimating the effort required for all producers at all stages of production to document the sources of all their inputs, and the willingness of business customers and the ultimate consumers to review such documentation, for both food and non- food products. Already, both you and I have wasted time peering into our fridges. Neither of us could really be bothered thinking hard about this. Multiply that (avoided) effort several billion times every year, and you should see immediately why common EU standards literally create wealth.
There is no “getting away” it is the standard of the WTO trade regulations that free trade areas established under the agreed on legal frameworks are valid instruments - indeed the agreements such as the EU zones existed prior to the WTO, which replaced the early international trade treaty or treaties.
Free trade areas are not circumventing any rules, if they meet the standards set by treaty that the WTO members sign up to for joining then the Free Trade Area is legally respected by the treaty and so binding.
If they do not then they do not.
This is very standard legal contract frameworks.
No, in fact they can not or rather you make characterizations about “heavy handed” based on a … superficial and incorrect understanding of both the actual legal frameworks (are you not a lawyer to understand the binding of the law?) as well as the interaction of the national rules the actual physical relatiies of physical exchanges between the different sovereign jurisdictions… The trade rules for the exchange of the goods are not - and this was covered for you before in earlier conversation I recall - things merely invented by Brussels, they are the interaction of the international WTO obligations and the actual reality of standard trade.
You mean if there was not the inaccurate promotion of the idea of Heavy Handedness against the highly magical ideas that a certain faction of Brexiters have about how the international agreements work.
As has been covered in the recent past discussions which you have been part of responding too, the Free Trade areas always include the engagements on the standards because it is a well established issue of the non Tariff barriers that are applied such as discriminatory goods inspections, rules on products are the major failure points of pseudo-free trade areas that do not in fact work for Free Trade. The real world examples of this are clear - the Arab and the Africa various free trade zones are great examples that I know personally from our investment business.
It is truly weird to make statements about countries being friends … busienss and law do not operate on informality - not successfully not over the long term, it is the legal instruments and the clear definitions although I suppose the bad lawyers write the fuzzy documents which lead to failure of the contracts all the times, but internationally this is not the best practice to apply.
This is incoherent and very magical thinking of how the goods trade occurs between countries (sans the controlling bodies within a free trade zone, like your own nation is a free trade zone)
(1) without controls there is no way for the consumer to know what is “British meat” and without inter sovereign oversight and coordination the abuse of such (as the Japanese for example are well reputed to use against you americans for example) is easy
(2) communiques without inspections and oversight are nothing more than like your President’s Tweets - they are political discourse, not useful information.
[quote=“UltraVires, post:805, topic:824424”]
I’m just not seeing it. The two countries (like the EU states) are sufficiently friendly that we are not going to allow tainted items to be shipped to other countries.
[/quote
You are repeating your false idea that was already refuted for you in the recent discussions that the Exporting Country is controlling outgoing goods to another country for quality
This is not the case as has been explained before.
It is not the case countries do Export controls in general and when these occur it is not for the general goods, but for specific strategic (like you Americans and your technology controls - it is for keeping sensitive technologies to yourselves, not protecting foreigners).
If his own country.
This has no meaning between countries - you are thinking as if your domestic exchange is how international trade works. It does not.
In fact yes it is IS LIKE THAT. Unless there are the specific legal instruments for the exchange of data - and the standards - legal instruments again to establish these so there is the common definition, there
So… In fact you end up with the very EU - Brussels mechanisms that you call “heavy handed” (of course the same exists domestically in your own country which is how and why you have a fully functioning internal domestic market - the common standards and enforcement mechanisms for the inter-state commerce, an importancee your own founders even in the 18th century understood, as they had the example of the European countries suffering from like in France and the German states the internal to their own state trade barriers ).
Only if there is the data exchange, you seem to think this happens automatically…
???..
How on earth will a Canadian consumer know of what is a US chicken unless there is the very goods controls, labeling and inspections against standards you have called heavy handed…
… You frankly do not understand international goods trade physical actual realities.
Yes - if the UK or the USA left the WTO, then they no longer need to abide by the WTO rules (which the idea of MFN comes from the earlier GATT that the USA promoted from 1948.
Of course then every WTO member would be free under the Treaty Rules to impose whatever duties and penalties on USA or UK goods they wanted, whatever controls desired with no restrictions.
no it would be a very bad thing as it would 100 percent certainly lead to the erection of the non tariff barriers to further boost goods discriminations and seriously undermine the Free Trade.
This is not mere theory, it is the observable fact in other supposed zones where there is not such standards setting the political interventions put up the non tariff barriers with the various pretextes.
That the Brussels compromises can be annoying and sometimes even stupid is without a doubt, but they are still gains by smoothing the Goods and the Services trade by reducing further and further the various attempts at the hidden national preferences and barriers.
What is sad is the UK before it decided to go very stupid, was one of the best voices for wearing down the intra-EU states fucking around with badly disguised barriers under non tariffs reasons.
Like you, many British people think that Brussels is heavy handed and have voted for Brexit accordingly. Like you, many people have reached this conclusion based on a common sense view of the situation. Like you many of them openly admit they have very limited understanding of the background, and no practical experience. Like you, they are unshakeable in their views, even as they ask the most elementary questions about relevant issues.
Some of us find those people’s confidence surprising.
As might be clear from my posts here, if I thought that a Brexit that didn’t seriously harm the country was possible, I’d be in favour of it. I did a fair bit of research into it before voting, and it took a while to realise that things that seemed like they should be true - and we were being told were true by the Leave campaign - were false.
The problem is the reasons for staying aren’t particularly compelling, as saying that things work as they are and don’t need to be changed is a tricky narrative to push.
Not in a free market, by definition.
… what?
the real world existence of the non tariff barriers by the various goods rules on goods, like goods standards are actual facts within the economies known in ordingary real life as free, like the Japan, like indeed Western Europe, etc.
Unless one is asserting some American Libertarian fiction world of pure idealized ‘free market’ it is absolutely the case in the real world of the real economies that the markets known as free have the non tariff barriers by such tools to the free trade of the goods from outside of the domestic sovereign…
by definition is the ideal unicorns world of analysis.
My views are not unshakeable. I have no views at all that actually matter. I am simply attempting to understand the issues and see which side I land on as it does not affect me or my family one whit what the UK decides to do.
I only ask to understand because the “common sense” view as you said seems to tell me that Brussels, at minimum, is being too heavy handed and causing people to want to “Leave.” And AFAI–can tell, there is no need for such massive regulation when a simple neighborly attitude would suffice for the goals that the EU wants to achieve.