Labeling and the Realization of Cultural Values

Abstract

Labeling plays a role of increasing significance as a technique to reveal, with adequate certification, the content of a product in both a physical and a moral sense by reporting, say, on labor conditions, environmental sustainability or animal friendliness of the product chain. Whereas voluntary labeling leaves all initiative to the private sector, under mandatory labeling the state imposes an obligation to label, often in conjunction with the requirement to meet official standards. Besides aiming to ensure product safety, standards derive from paternalistic motives and seek to mitigate external effects of consumption, to manage catastrophic risks, to improve the representation of the poor, and to preserve the cultural heritage. Nowadays, they are also used in the fight against crime and terrorism and for the protection of intellectual property rights. Standard-based labeling is a source of recurrent conflict because it serves both to protect the own culture and to export it. Developed countries fear that discretionary policies at a national level would harm their exports. They call for international harmonization of the standards but developing countries are reluctant to participate, because their exports might suffer, while antiglobalists denounce it as an instrument of domination by the North. The paper reviews the arguments on both sides. It adopts a WTO perspective in proposing that for non-product standards, international harmonization, rather than being attached to products, should apply to territories, be organized by subject and delegated to specialized international agencies that operate under the mandate of separate international treaties. But we differ from the WTO position when we argue first, that product as well as non-product standards should be modulated so as to reflect the cultural diversity across countries and their different stages of development, and second, that it should be permitted that countries refusing to sign a treaty should face import restrictions by signatories.