What do international trade agreements have to do with consumer protections? Increasingly, the answer seems to be “too much.”
Recently, the United States joined Mexico and the Dominican Republic in challenging Ireland’s regulation of alcoholic beverage labeling in the World Trade Organization. The new Irish law would require alcoholic beverage labels to disclose calories, the amount in grams of alcohol per serving and per container, and various health warning statements including, most importantly: “There is a direct link between alcohol and fatal cancers.”
For United States trade officials, these labeling rules are an “unlawful trade barrier.” For consumer and public health advocates, they are a template for how to design labels to prevent inadvertent overconsumption and raise awareness of alcohol’s role as the third most important modifiable risk factor for cancer deaths in the U.S.
How did we get here? Trade agreements were once mostly focused on lowering tariffs, or duties, on imports. For decades now, however, “free trade” has come to mean trade that is free from regulatory barriers to imports and foreign investors. No country’s democratic process is immune to the resulting pressure. In the United States, consumers lost the right to country-of-origin labeling (COOL) on beef and pork products after Mexico and Canada challenged the rules in the World Trade Organization. The countries argued that keeping track of what meat came from what animals would be so expensive that the giant meatpacking companies would simply stop buying pigs and cows from across the border. Therefore, the law was an unlawful trade barrier. The WTO’s Appellate Body agreed. After it authorized sanctions, Congress quietly repealed the law.
Ireland’s alcohol labeling law could meet a similar fate, but not if CFA can help it. Last year, CFA asked EU regulators to approve the law despite objections from industry and major alcohol exporters like Italy. More recently, CFA and its allies wrote to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo to ask U.S. officials not to interfere in the implementation of sound public health policies abroad, policies that should have been adopted in the United States a long time ago.
Indeed, in 2003, CFA and its allies petitioned federal regulators to require basic information on alcohol labels such as the amount of alcohol in fluid ounces per suggested serving, the number of calories, and ingredients. To this day, labeling requirements remain unchanged, although last spring, in response to a lawsuit filed by CFA and other petitioners, the Treasury Department agreed to issue proposed rules requiring standardized alcohol content, calorie, and allergen disclosures. CFA has yet to receive a response to another petition seeking to update the health warning statement on alcoholic beverages for the first time since 1988.
As with Ireland’s proposed law, a new health warning statement on alcohol in the U.S. should alert consumers to the fact that alcohol causes cancer. More than any other element of Ireland’s law, this cancer warning requirement most bothers the industry, but it is sorely needed. Researchers with the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR) estimate that alcohol may account for as many as 7,300 breast cancer deaths annually—some 15% of all such deaths. Yet just 24.6% of women surveyed in the U.S. think that “drinking alcoholic beverages increases a woman’s chances of getting breast cancer.”
Such a gap between the harms associated with a product, and the awareness of those harms, provides fertile ground for educational policies to improve public health. Ireland is poised to take advantage. Let’s hope U.S. trade officials get out of the way!