Source: POLITICO'S MORNING AGRICULTURE, 10/2/18

Food safety advocates are concerned about provisions in the new trade pact they say could lower U.S. food safety standards in an effort to harmonize regulations across the three nations.

The agreement includes provisions aimed at coordinating "sanitary and phytosanitary" regulations that aim to protect human, animal and plant health. The Trump administration touted those provisions as a "key achievement" in the deal that will streamline certifications, audits and equivalency agreements, and make import checks more transparent, as Catherine reports.

Thomas Gremillion, director of the Consumer Federation of America's Food Policy Institute, tells MA that the new language "raises some serious concerns that trade promotion will compromise food safety under this agreement."

Race to the bottom: "The emphasis on 'science-based decision making' and the new opportunities for importing states and interested industry to second-guess the standards could very well drive a race to the bottom," Gremillion wrote in an email.
Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, said in a statement that the text "encourages the United States to accept the food safety rules in Mexico as comparable to domestic protections, and to accept imports from Mexico with less scrutiny than from other countries."

The new trade deal also includes language on biotechnology innovations like gene-editing and calls for the three nations to share information on the new technologies. Gremillion and Hauter both warned the language could limit how the U.S. is able to regulate genetically modified products.