Swine Flu: Russia’s WTO Accession May Be First Casualty

By Adrian Erlinger, Account Manager, The PBN Company, Washington, DC

With $476 million in exports last year, Russia is the fifth-largest market for US pork. Yet as the sudden outbreak of swine influenza spreads, the health of Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization could also take a turn for the worse.

On April 27, Russia’s Federal Agency for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Supervision (Rosselkhoznadzor) banned all meat imports - including poultry and beef - from the US states of California, Texas, Kansas, New York and Ohio, and non-thermally treated pork imports from eight other states.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continue to reiterate to an increasingly unnerved public that pork is safe to eat. “You cannot get swine influenza from eating pork or pork products,” stated US Trade Representative Ron Kirk and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in an e-mailed statement on April 28. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization is even lobbying for a name change to disassociate pork production with the human-human virus.

Rosselkhoznadzor quickly rebuffed US assurances, claiming that eating and handling raw pork meat can transmit swine flu, adding that in denying this US meat exporters are only trying to protect their interests.

Over the past year, Russia has failed to “relist” 34 US pork processing, production and storage facilities - effectively rendering around half of all US pork production ineligible for export to Russia. On April 8, the National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) called on the Obama administration to decelerate Russia’s WTO accession until it began to “play by the rules and stop its blatant actions to restrict US pork.”

Until this week, Russia has not been able to identify any health or sanitary reasons for blocking US meat imports - the requirement for justifying the block as per its 2006 bilateral WTO obligations. The ineptly named swine flu now presents a reason for Russia to approve US meat facilities on a plant-by-plant basis - actions inconsistent with the WTO’s Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Agreement requiring WTO signatories to recognize equally standards in other countries.

While the US NPPC calls Russia’s ban “protectionism, plain and simple,” the implications of Russia’s meat ban go far beyond the interests of the US pork lobby. In a trade row dubbed the “Meat Wars,” Poland threatened to block Russia’s entry to the WTO based on Russia’s 2005 embargo on Polish imports of agricultural products. Warsaw went even further, blocking talks on a new Partnership and Cooperation Agreement between Russia and the EU. While both sides accused each other of politicizing the situation, the “Meat Wars” provided plenty of excuse for mutual mistrust on a host of outstanding issues.

Pressing the “reset button” on US-Russian relations in early April on the sidelines of the G-20 Summit, both President Medvedev and President Obama cited Russia’s entry into the WTO as a top priority. Speaking in Washington on April 24, Russia’s Minister of Finance Alexei Kudrin emphasized that WTO entry would spur his country’s diversification efforts and help shake off the economic crisis.

Representative Kirk, however, warned that Russia’s meat ban “may result in serious trade disruptions without cause.” If the “Meat Wars” waged in the past repeat themselves, US support for Russia’s WTO entry will falter once again, with wider implications for overall relations.

But for now, anyway, it seems that Virginia ham is strictly off the menu in Voronezh.

Possibly related posts:

1. Pigs Are Still a Problem, But Russia’s WTO Accession Chances Are Looking Up
2. Having it Both Ways - Russia is Saying Yes to Both the WTO and the Customs Union
3. [Obama in Moscow] With the ‘Reset’, US Companies ‘Re-Commit’ to Russia
4. What a Difference a Day Makes: Russia’s WTO Accession Hits Surprise New Hurdle
5. After Two U-Turns, Has Russia’s Accession to the WTO Come Full Circle?