In many countries, non-tariff measures (NTMs) have increasingly replaced tariffs as international trade barriers and as a subject of trade negotiations in recent years (Walkenhorst, 2004). This article investigates how the NTM landscape has evolved in Swiss trade relationships, in particular for agri-food products. NTMs are generally defined as “policy measures other than ordinary customs tariffs that can potentially have an economic effect on international trade in goods, changing quantities traded, or prices or both” (UNCTAD 2010, p.99). The Swiss agri-food trade is highly impacted by NTMs, much more than for instance trade with manufactured goods or natural resources. NTMs applied to Swiss imports include mostly Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) measures, Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT), Tariff Rate Quotas (TRQs), and in recent years an increasing number of sustainability standards, which mostly fall under the categories of SPS or TBT measures. We show that in Switzerland, like in many other countries, there are two opposing movements: On the one hand, more NTMs are created, also because the landscape of private sustainability standards and organic labels has continuously grown in recent years. On the other hand, there is an effort to harmonize standards and to mutually recognize them in multi- or bilateral trade agreements, leading to a decrease in NTMs. With Switzerland’s most important trade partner, the EU, a very high level of harmonization and mutual recognition of standards has been reached. Further, with non-EU trade partners, Switzerland tries novel approaches regarding the harmonization of sustainability standards, for instance in the recently negotiated EFTA-Indonesia preferential trade agreement. This agreement includes product-specific sustainability requirements for palm oil imports, linked to preferential tariff rates for imports classified as sustainable. This agreement is also novel in a way that it relies on voluntary private standards, in this case on the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and other private certification schemes. It is yet to be seen whether this approach can serve as a model for future negotiations of trade agreements by Switzerland and other countries alike.
