Cooperative Agreement to Support the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Standards and Trade Development Facility (STDF)

The Standards and Trade Development Facility (STDF) is a unique global partnership established by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), World Bank, World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). The STDF supports developing countries in building their capacity to implement international sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) standards, guidelines and recommendations as a means to improve their human, animal and plant health status and ability to gain or maintain access to markets. In achieving its aims, the STDF acts both as a coordinating and a financing mechanism. The STDF is a widely established knowledge platform for information exchange, sharing experiences and the identification and dissemination of good practice on SPS-related technical cooperation. STDF utilizes a key decision-support tool, Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), to help establish SPS priorities and ensure resources are used as efficiently as possible. The use of the MCDA tool is unique within the STDF and is a highly-valued attribute; the MCDA tool facilitates an open and transparent discussion among public and private stakeholders about capacity-building needs and resources. The STDF is committed to the Paris Principles on Aid Effectiveness and to achieving the Millennium Development Goals.With an increasingly diverse and complex global food supply, FDA’s interest is to strengthen food safety systems globally to prevent food safety problems rather than merely reacting to problems after they occur. FDA recognizes that it cannot do this alone. By leveraging with other WTO member countries and partnering with the STDF, the FDA can broaden the reach of food safety capacity building efforts. The purpose of this Cooperative Agreement is to:1) Conduct research contributing to the knowledge base and development of food safety systems globally due to the increasingly diverse and complex food supply.2) Enhance and broaden FDA’s ability to address global food safety and public health issues associated with food.3) Provide opportunities to leverage additional resources among WTO member countries. According to an independent external evaluation of the STDF in 2008, the STDF “carries out an important role that no other single body would be able to accomplish”. (Source: STDF Newsletter; Volume 2, Issue 1. February 2009. Accessible at: www.standardsfacility.org) As such, the STDF is the only forum that can successfully accomplish the global objectives of this cooperative agreement.This Cooperative Agreement will allow FDA to deepen its international food safety capacity building partnerships, provide a wider scope of impact than exists currently and leverage resources with other countries.