TBT Stipulations and Stakeholder Responses: Repercussions in the Sea Food Sector of India and the Tuning up Process in the State of Kerala

Abstract

Sea food is a globally traded product. The trading is mostly from the developing to the developed countries. The very basic factor beholding this is the income elasticity driven demand from the affluent consumers of the developed world. The rich fishery resource availability of the developing countries has helped to become the major beneficiaries of this trade process. The rich resource of India and Kerala have indeed helped in reaping this benefit. However, the post WTO period also witnessed big transformation in the fishery trade with more stringent restrictions, regulations and quality assurance practices mostly imposed by the importers of seafood. These include strict quality standards stipulations, technical barriers and non-tariff barriers imposed by the developed economies towards seafood exports. In these, TBT measures and SPS standards have differently been treated by different importers in the EU, Japan and the US and this is stipulated mostly for the prime export item of Kerala the shrimp. Though it has affected every seafood exporter globally, its repercussion in India and Kerala is also big as these measures have been detrimental to the progress of the export sector. India could soon try to galvanize these issues. The result is that India has come out from the shackles of TBT conundrums. But the fact is that when one of the issues is settled, the EU and the US are coming with newer stipulations. The paper tries to addresses the fisheries trade with the existing theoretical framework. It also gives an overview of various agreements prevailing in the seafood export sector with the aid of secondary information.

Keywords: Fishery Trade, Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT), Non-Tariff Barriers (NTB), Trade agreements, Sanitary and Phytosanitary, Codex, WTO.

DOI: 10.7176/JESD/13-10-07

Publication date:May 31^st 2022