Impact of Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Measures on Kenya in Global Trade

Dr. Nanyingi M.O

In the recent years the international trade arena has witnessed the growing importance of “within the border” barriers. Standards and technical regulations are the new critical issue on the international trade agenda. Among these, sanitary and phytosanitary measures occupy a special place because of their crucial aim: safeguard of health and safety of human beings in accordance with the WHO. From the point of view of economic efficiency there are very few circumstances in which it can be accepted a departure from free trade. Sanitary and phytosanitary measures pose a fundamental challenge to this traditional “economic perspective”. This study attempts to disentangle the complexity of sanitary and phytosanitary measures that, uniquely amongst “potential trade obstacles”, in Kenya mix elements of genuine protection and elements of disguised protectionism.


There is need to exemplify the crucial elements that characterize regulations in general and SPS measures, a synthetic overview of the institutional framework set by the WTO’s SPS agreement in order to situate the issue of SPS in its concrete settings outlining the set of rules that bind their use. Understanding the difficulties posed to “economic analysis” by domestic regulations are tackled and a potential solution will be deliberated making use of a partial equilibrium economic model for evaluating the impact of SPS measures.

The main objective is demonstrate the complexity that traditional economic reasoning do have when tackling the relationships between regulations-standards and international trade. A simulation to present an econometric method to measure the effect of standards and domestic regulations on trade flows taking as example the aflatoxins standards and trade in food between Kenya and EU. This is a direct attempt to tackle the problem of empirically “quantifying” the impact of some specific domestic standards on international exchange, which is clearly a first step towards the objective of evaluating the trade-off posed by the introduction of standards. In conclusion the limits of economic “output based” rationality and the need for integrating it with legal “procedure based” rationality when evaluating SPS measures in Kenya will be discussed.

Key words: Kenya, Trade barriers, SPS.