ABSTRACT
The Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement (SPS) of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is an effort to reduce the technical barriers to trade created by phytosanitary regulations. A key feature of the SPS agreement is the role of risk assessment and risk management in determining appropriate quarantine actions that provide an acceptable level of risk to the importer and can be justified on technical and trade terms. A major problem to date has been quantifying the effects of phytosanitary regulations in a way that permits objective comparisons. This chapter presents a model for quantifying quarantine-related trade barriers. The model combines the two basic components of pest risk assessment, probability of establishment and economic effects, into a management framework and an objective measure and provides a systematic basis for defining and measuring acceptable risk and justifying quarantine actions relative to acceptable risk.
