EU food regulation and transatlantic trade and investment partnership

Topic of this master thesis is food safety in the European Union and United States as one of the most debated chapters in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). TTIP goals are to abolish custom duties, reduce bureaucracy and ease investment restriction so that import and export of the goods and services is easier, which would lead to economic progress, employment growth and it would facilitate investments. The goal of this master thesis will be to see if signing the TTIP could lead to creating new regulation. This will be achieved by examining possible benefits and risks of signing TTIP for EU consumers and EU producers. Advantages that could occur for EU customers by signing TTIP, if one assume that EU have better quality food is opening the market to US products, which would mean having more options to choose, prices would be lower and competition would be bigger so the producers would try harder meaning they would producers better quality food. This could also have negative impact on the EU consumers – EU market would be flooded with cheap US products that have to fulfill lenient standards in the US and EU products would become more expensive. In scenario where EU food is the same or worse quality than US food, positive impacts would be that EU consumers would pay less for the food of the same quality or better quality. The advantages for EU producers that could occur by signing TTIP is elimination of tariffs and non-tariff barriers that could enable small producers and farmers to export more and EU producers would have opportunity to take over up growing US organic food market. Disadvantages would be that they would have bigger competition, it would lead to market disruption and it would probably affect geographical indication rules, genetically modified food rules and other differences in legislation. Since EU and US food regulation are completely different and EU has stricter approach regarding food safety and quality than US, signing TTIP will be hard to achieve. To accomplish regulatory convergence there are several options, but what I think it is the best solution is setting up a completely new regulatory framework where both sides would have to make compromises and meet in the middle. That means that EU would have to loosen up a bit their regulation, while US would have to make their regulation little bit stricter. Having one harmonized regulation for US and EU market would eventually reduce cost, barriers as well as innovations on not only EU – US trade relation, but on the global scale. Conclusion of this thesis will be that TTIP can remove trade barriers and non-tariff barriers only if it is singed together with regulatory convergence, and if countries do not come up with mutual agreement on regulatory convergence TTIP could be in danger. Harmonized food regulation would be able to protect consumers and producers and offer consumers food of decent quality while at the same time offer them a wide range of products which would be prices adequately. Producers on the other hand will be able to import and export more easily and with less cost than until now