Conformity assessment and trade facilitation
Harmonizing conformity assessment procedures around the world has far-reaching benefits for international trade in general. Agreements among nations or regions on the mutual acceptability of requirements, assessment methods, inspection or test results, etc., can all help to reduce or remove technical barriers to trade. These are procedures or requirements relating to importation and market access that vary from country to country and may bar a foreign product from entering a country.
The World Trade Organization's Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (WTO TBT Agreement) was established to ensure that technical regulations and standards, and the procedures for assessing conformity with them, do not create unnecessary obstacles to international trade. The World Trade Organization has increasingly recognized that technical barriers to trade are one of the main hindrances to the free flow of goods and services.
The WTO TBT Agreement promotes the recognition of others' conformity assessment results as a way of reducing barriers to trade. It emphasizes that confidence in the continued reliability of conformity assessment results is a prerequisite to recognition of assessments.
The Agreement says that verifiable compliance with International Standards or Guides for the operation of accreditation, testing, inspection and certification bodies is considered as an indication of adequate technical competence. Many of the relevant standards and guides are ISO/IEC publications produced under the auspices of CASCO, the ISO committee on conformity assessment.
ISO and the World Trade Organization work increasingly closely to ensure that the above benefits are realized. The importance of the International Standards and Guides on conformity assessment developed by CASCO to removing technical barriers to trade and facilitating the flow of goods and services is recognized by the World Trade Organization.
A practical example of trade facilitation is where a country exporting cheese to another country accompanies the product with a test report on, amongst other criteria, the fat content, to enable the importing country to classify the cheese according to its regulations on fat content. The importing country may accept the test report of the importing country with no qualifications based on its level of confidence in the conformity assessment procedures used and in place within the exporting country. The alternative would be where there is no level of confidence and the importing country requires the product to be completely retested in the imported country. This would add time and cost to the whole process.