Australia - Measures Affecting Importation of Salmon Report of the Panel (Continued) ANNEX 2 PANEL ON AUSTRALIA - MEASURES AFFECTING IMPORTATION OF SALMON PANEL ESTABLISHED AT THE REQUEST OF CANADA Transcript of the Joint Meeting with Experts, Held on 4 February 1998 Chairman 1. Let me first of all begin by welcoming the scientific experts and the parties to this meeting, let me start by informing you that this meeting is being recorded. Therefore, when you take the floor, please be sure to turn on your microphone by pressing the green button. A red light is visible on the microphone when it is on. Equally important, please turn off your microphone when you have finished speaking; this system only permits one microphone to be on at a time. I think there is one other thing in that context, if you could also speak reasonably slowly and clearly because there will have to be a transcript prepared afterwards and it will help to facilitate that process. 2. Now the purpose of this meeting is to permit the experts to expand on their written responses to the Panel's questions, highlighting the main points, and to permit a full exchange of views between the experts, the parties and the Panel. 3. Now I would like to take the opportunity to thank the experts for having agreed to serve as advisers to the Panel, and for having responded within such a short period of time to the Panel's questions. As you know, we do have to operate under time constraints and we must produce reports within certain periods. This puts considerable pressure, not only on use but on you as well and I am grateful to you for responding as you have. 4. For your information, that is to say for the information of the experts, following today's meeting and a second meeting tomorrow with the parties to the dispute, the Panel must then proceed to prepare its report. The first part of this report summarizes the facts of the case and the arguments of the parties and will be provided in draft form to the parties for their comments. An element of this first factual part of the report will be a compilation of your written responses to the Panel's questions, and this will be circulated to you and you will be given the opportunity to make any necessary corrections to this summary of your responses. Subsequently, the Panel must provide first a complete, interim report to the parties and then its Final Report, and we intend to include a transcript of today's meeting as an annex to the report, it will probably appear at the interim or even the final stage because I doubt that the transcript will be ready in time to go out with the factual part, in any case it will appear and will be a verbatim record of what has taken place today. So I thought you might like to be aware of that before we actually launch into the proceedings. 5. Now I must stress that the process of this Panel, the proceedings in the Panel meeting are confidential and everything which is said in this room is subject to the WTO rules of dispute settlement and the Panel's working procedures. When the Panel has concluded its work and a Final Report is circulated to all WTO Members, that report is normally considered to be a public document, including the summary of your responses to the Panel's questions and the transcript of this meeting, so we expect that the Final Report will be circulated in that form in, probably late May. 6. In terms of this meeting, the Panel intends to proceed as follows: I will first give the experts the floor, one-by-one, to make any general introductory remarks which they believe to be appropriate. There is no need to repeat at length what is already in your written responses, but I would invite you to highlight your main points in the areas where you see the most important issues and points of contention. Should you wish to comment on any points made by another expert, please feel free to do so. I would also draw your attention to a number of additional questions that were sent out by the Panel, they were additional to the first round of questions. Perhaps if you could take the opportunity of your opening statements to address the ones that concern you - they are not all of them for all experts -but please address those which concern you. It would be helpful if you could do that in your initial statements. 7. When this is concluded we will then open the floor open to the parties and begin with Canada. Canada will be given the opportunity to put questions and comments on the experts' views and the experts will then be invited to respond. We would like to take the questions one-by-one in order to ensure an orderly process, but should Australia have any follow-up question directly linked to one that has just been raised by Canada, it would then have the opportunity to raise that question at the same time so that we do not subsequently crisscross backwards and forwards between the subjects - if we get into a subject let us deal with it and dispose of it. Similarly, after the responses from the experts to Canada, Australia will be given the opportunity to raise their questions and comments on experts views. If Canada has any directly related follow up questions, they would be permitted to insert those as well. Again, the experts will have the opportunity to respond to each question as they are raised. Now I would emphasize that it is really up to the experts how they respond to these questions, this is not an interrogation or court of law, they should feel relaxed about it and obviously offer their expertise as they see fit. I have to say that my experience with these sort of sessions in the past, has been that they have been conducted very satisfactorily from the point of view of the expert advice, there is no real, no element of interrogation in any way. 8. That said, the primary focus today, is the discussion with the experts and I would ask the parties to refrain from the sort of statements and re-battle arguments which they will have the opportunity to deliver tomorrow. Tomorrow, however, will be the final opportunity for submissions from the parties but today the priority is to give time to the experts and the scientific factual issues under discussion with them. 9. Subsequent to the interventions of the parties, the Panel may wish to raise some further questions or seek some further additional clarification, and finally, I will give the experts an opportunity to take the floor again individually for any final statements which you may wish to make, so that you may stress what views and conclusions you consider most important. I would ask all of you, both experts and parties to try and be as succinct and to the point as possible and to avoid, for example any lengthy repetition of what has already been submitted in writing. So, with these remarks, I would now turn to the experts themselves, they are identified by name-plates and I will name them as I give the floor to them. I would ask, when we get to the parties, if whoever is going to speak from the parties would identify themselves, would introduce themselves as they take the floor, not just only for the benefit of the experts and ourselves but also so that we can identify them for the purpose of the transcript. 10. That said, unless there are any questions on procedure, I would propose now to invite the experts to take the floor. I will offer it to them in alphabetical order for want of any other basis, so perhaps I could begin by welcoming Dr. Burmaster to this meeting and to invite him to take the floor. 11. If you which to make a presentation or make use of the slide machine there is a portable microphone, but if you do not then please you will find it is better there. Dr. Burmaster 12. Good morning and thank you it is a great pleasure to be here this morning and I must say that this is my first such experience so please bear with me as I work along to assist the Panel as best I can. I guess I have one or two comments only that I would like to make now, to supplement my written statement from last November. 13. The first is that I said in November, and I continue to say now, that a risk assessment for this type of issue, I believe should be done in quantitative fashion; that it should involve a numerical calculations as best as is known and with stated uncertainties. At its heart, I believe a risk assessment should be conducted with numerical arguments and to persist on that, I would think that it would use probability distributions and those probability distributions could take a number of different forms - there is no unique correct way to do this style of analysis - but I do believe that however one put together the information that it would include probabilistic descriptions of the variability of what we do know about events and the nature of fish diseases and transmission of fish diseases and so on. It should also somehow state numerically as best as possible the degree of certainty or the degree of uncertainty in human knowledge associated with those calculations. I have been asked from time to time what would be the minimal, the minimum requirements of such a risk assessment and coming as I do from the United States, I would say that we, in the United States, have adopted a sort of generally, a four step process for risk analysis. The first step would be hazard identification, the second would be dose response assessment, the third would be the exposure assessment and the forth and final step of the risk assessment would be risk characterization. Typically, in the States, the hazard identification step is done qualitatively; one identifies the nature of the problem and in this instance what diseases might occur and what species of fish may be susceptible to those diseases. That would be a discussion qualitative in nature. But then, and the remaining steps, dose response assessment, exposure assessment and risk characterization, those steps would all be quantitative steps done with numerical calculations to display the probabilities of occurrence, the probabilities of dose response, the probabilities of exposure and the probabilities of risk characterization. That would conclude the risk assessment steps and then to go on, there would be additional steps: risk communication and risk management steps such as you and other risk managers might undertake. 14. On the second question that came up, here we have, in this situation, multiple fish diseases, potentially multiple fish diseases and potentially multiple target species of fish. The question has arisen if there are ten diseases of fish - ten different diseases - and five different fish species, to make up a hypothetical argument, do we have to multiply those and do fifty, ten times five, different risk assessments? I think, as a practical matter one need not have to do fifty different risk assessments. I think that there are ways to sort through that, it may be that you would have to do one or two or smaller number of risk assessments not a full number of fifty. Let me stop there and thank you. Chairman 15. Thank you very much Dr. Burmaster, let me now welcome Dr. Rodgers and invite him to give his opening comments and you have the floor Sir. Dr. Rodgers 16. Thank you Mr. Chairman, I will be a little more expansive than Dr. Burmaster, because I think my particular background expertise involves fish diseases, fish disease transmission and prevalence so there are some relevant points to make in these sections. But before I make some comments, I would like to thank the Panel for the opportunity to address them and also I hope so far my answers have proved useful to them in their understanding of the background to the case. I personally found it a fascinating exercise which at times for me has been both difficult and frustrating. Not necessarily because of the nature of the problem but certainly the 20 kilos or so of paper which arrived on my doorstep to evaluate and assess, which is almost one kilo for each year of the dispute, which is not too bad going really. 17. My own answers to the questions posed for the experts have tried to clarify any contentious points, if you like, within which is a very complex scenario. I have also tried to be non-technical where at all possible using fact to support my own personal opinion, which again, I hope has helped the Panel so far. Consequently, I think my answers and possibly those of the other experts should be taken as a whole and not taken out of context and dissected down into phrases because as I say it is a very complex situation we find ourselves in but, having said that, I recognise that in certain cases it is almost inevitable that phrases are taken out of context. With hindsight, I particularly enjoyed answering questions such as eight and fourteen because at the end of the day both parties seem to agree that my answers were supportive of their own particular stances so that puts me in a better position today. 18. I will try to summarize the answers that I have already given by making some general comments related to selected relevant points, as I see them, perhaps some of the more important points, while at the same time responding to the supplementary questions which were sent to us some weeks ago. Although I will not necessarily name the supplementary questions by number. The original sections were divided -the original questions rather - were divided into three sections, those related to risk assessment procedures, fish diseases, transmission and prevalence, and also the OIE procedures. I will deal with them in traditional reverse order because I did not attempt to answer the OIE section at all, because I did not really have enough working knowledge of the OIE to comment. I also do not propose to dwell too much on the section concerning fish diseases because the responses from the parties were largely in agreement with some, what I would call minor, exceptions, although they themselves may not agree that the exceptions were minor. 19. Essentially though, what I would say about the disease section is that the most accurate up to date information concerning disease prevalence in an exporting country is usually held by the exporting country itself, providing that country is of course recognised as a competent authority. In this case of course, Canada has a well respected monitoring system in place for this type of situation. The degree of scientific confidence in disease detection with existing methods relies really on the lowest limits of detection of each particular test, or series of identification methods. However, this can lead to difficulties in isolating certain fish viral pathogens and also certain bacterial strains. In addition there is a cut off sensitivity point for most diagnostic methods which leads to the carrier state in particular being difficult to detect, except with the most sensitive methods that are available. Nevertheless, any deficiencies in sensitivity for existing methods are generally accepted by the scientific community both in terms of the supportive science and also by the legislative policies that actually stipulate their use in regular surveillance programmes. It is also true to say that regularly tested stocks are normally considered as a lesser risk than occasionally or untested stocks, since regular monitoring will provide a background database if you like, of information over time. However, post harvesting testing for disease in fish, tested for human consumption is very rarely undertaken at all. 20. As far as actual disease transmission is concerned, this of course combines many biological, behavioural and environmental factors which are interrelated - we cannot get away from that fact. As such, the epidemiological factors relevant to disease transmission would not necessarily be the same for each disease since they are complex and numerous, although the general aspects would be common. Perhaps the most relevant factor to my mind, in this particular case is the introduction of potential pathogens into an already stable environment. Since the natural balance of an indigenous fish population could be altered perhaps irreversibly, this is one factor which perhaps is overriding in this particular case of transmission. However, having said that, there is a generally accepted lack of information about the occurrence of fish diseases in wild fish and the potential interactions between wild fish and the mechanisms of disease introduction themselves. 21. The question of evisceration is also relevant here obviously. I think that we are all in agreement generally that it is an effective means of reducing the level of risk although the level of reduction would largely depend on tissue location of the disease-causing agent and the effectiveness of the evisceration process. Nevertheless, we do not know of any specific cases where fish diseases have been transmitted from one area to another by imported eviscerated salmonids, or in fact any other species of eviscerated fish. 22. Also the post-harvest organoleptic examination for grading purposes should remove unsightly looking fish such as those which may have ulcers or extensive haemorrhaging or some sort of superficial damage. These conditions could occur as a result of disease, although again, carrier subclinically infected fish could still remain after such an examination. 23. Now, I do not propose to comment any further on the consequences of disease entry because I think in general again we are in agreement as to which main step-wise criteria need to be fulfilled for this to happen. However, we should bear in mind that early detection of disease entry and subsequent eradication following any disease establishment would be very difficult in any country. The only supplementary question which does not fall easily within the three main sections that the original questions were divided into was directed specifically at myself, which basically asks what is "steelhead trout" or "rainbow trout", so if I may I will deal with it at this point before I move on to the risk assessment section. Essentially steelhead trout and rainbow trout are salmonids not salmon and they are the same species, that is they are Oncorhynchus mykiss). There are some salmon within the same genus of Oncorhynchus but they are true salmon such as coho salmon and sockeye salmon. The main difference between steelheads and rainbows is their ability to migrate. The steelhead trout is the anadromous, migrating fish compared to the rainbow trout which is the non-anadromous, non-migrating equivalent. These fish were originally placed in the genus Salmo as the Atlantic salmon still are, but rising taxonomic evidence, if you like, in 1989 led to the change being made because these fish were considered more closely related to the Oncorhynchus genus than the Salmo genus which contains more Atlantic European species, and at that time all specific drainage trout were placed into the genus Oncorhynchus. 24. That brings me to the final section, which is perhaps for us as experts the most contentious section on risk assessment procedures, and in particular, the comparison between the two reports as presented to us. For me the 1996 Final Report is generally less specific than the 1995 Draft Report. It is also more confusing in layout but includes the product of a communication exercise which the Draft Report does not. In fact, we are led to believe it was never within the original remit of the Draft Report to contain a risk communication exercise. Neither report can be classified as a quantitative risk assessment exercise, but the Draft Report, for me, is a clear qualitative assessment of importation risks. Although both reports largely rely on interpretation of the same risk assessment data, the Final Report reaches a different risk analysis conclusion which is a result, for me, of public consultation. In general, the 1995 Draft Report is acceptable for me and meets the minimum requirements as a qualitative risk assessment. 25. As far as the 1996 Final Report is concerned, of course it is based on the earlier Draft Report, that was the intention, and also includes the results of a risk communication exercise which should make it equally acceptable. I think we have the luxury, if you like, of being able to compare the two reports and when you do, there does, for me, appear to be something lacking in the Final Report which is surprising because, following the 1995 Report it should have all the basic elements in place. This missing element seems specifically related to its clarity and its detail and the underlying methodology which almost appears to be a straight forward literature review without conclusion. 26. To be honest, I got completely lost in the Final Report looking for sections which were possibly out of place and this, in my opinion, makes it less transparent then the original Draft Report. It assesses risks on a disease-by-disease basis but in a textural form and does not assign any probabilities that would be needed to reach a conclusion. In this respect, therefore, I think, it possibly does fall short of determining any probability based on the information available. This concept of probability is embodied in OIE guidelines which indicate that the risk factors should be used to estimate the probability of an adverse event occurring with point estimates of probability distributions, employed to represent the values either quantitatively or qualitatively. 27. Therefore, taken alone without reference to the Draft Report, it is probably not acceptable overall as a risk assessment exercise, although it does include more components. There seems to have been a change in style, content and approach in the Final Report following the risk communication step. I personally think this has devalued the report as a whole, which is after all supposed to be the published face of the whole analysis process. 28. If you are concerned with several diseases, effectively the risks are identified by drawing up a list of the potential diseases of concern that would be associated with the importation of a particular fish product, followed by an examination of the consequences of their entry and establishment. Now, although many risk factors are common between different diseases, each disease may have unique factors to consider and each of these will have a variable quality and quantitative of available data that will need to be dealt with separately, which does make it necessary to assess risks on a disease-by-disease basis. But following on from what David Burmaster said, of course you might be able to analyze a higher risk disease in order to arrive at an answer, rather then having actually to look at every individual disease in turn. 29. So where does all that leave us? I got a little confused, and its probably relevant at this point to make an overall summary, purely from a scientific point of view, as I see it. This means effectively that we can now bring in the 1997 risk assessment which was submitted by Canada, that uses a quantitative method to consider the data already available in 1995 for the two most serious diseases of concern, namely those caused by Aeromonas salmonicida and Renibacterium salmoninarum. To illustrate the point, we fortunately do not have to look, in my mind, into greater depth at the report because we could be here until tomorrow, but rather look at the overall conclusions of the various reports following the various risk assessment components. Here I will read, I am sorry, I will have to quote from the various reports. 30. In the 1995 Draft Report AQIS concludes that "wild, ocean-caught Pacific salmon from Canada and the USA that have been eviscerated and had their heads removed, when consumed in the domestic or restaurant setting, are considered to present a negligible risk of disease introduction and establishment". It also states that "it is considered extremely unlikely that the importation of headless, eviscerated, wild, ocean-caught Pacific salmon would introduce infection into Australian fish populations" (and here it is referring to Aeromonas salmonicida in particular), and that "the risk of disease introduction is acceptably low, having regard to the potential serious consequences of such an event". 31. In the 1996 Final Report there is a reference which says "there are risks of exotic disease agents occurring in salmon products; however, the risk of establishment of an exotic disease is low if suitable risk management interventions are made". 32. In the 1997 Canadian Risk Assessment (the so-called Vose Assessment), there is a statement which says "the risk of native salmonid infection with Aeromonas salmonicida or Renibacterium salmoninarum from Canadian salmon is exceedingly small" and that "the information available to Australia at the time of writing their reports was sufficient to enable them to conclude that the furunculosis and BKD risk posed by Canadian salmon must be considered negligibly small" there is also a final statement which says "head-on and heads-off, chilled and frozen eviscerated Canadian ocean-caught Pacific salmon all present negligible risk of disease introduction". 33. Now for me, I take it to mean that all these reports actually reach a similar scientific conclusion, unless negligible in one report refers to a different level of risk in another report, which is quite possible, I do not know whether Marion Wooldridge or David Burmaster can comment at a later stage on the difference between phrases such as "negligible", "extremely unlikely", "acceptably low", "low", "exceedingly small" and "negligibly small". The interesting thing is that both the original qualitative 1995 AQIS Draft Report and the quantitative 1997 Vose Assessment use the same concluding phrase, "negligible risk". What neither of them have is risk communication. 34. The problem for me seems to be the change in emphasis and conclusion in the 1996 Final Report, which seems to consider the scientific advice but then reaches a political decision, following public consultation, as I have said. Now the OIE revised guidelines state that the importing countries shall decide whether the risk determined in the import analysis is acceptable or not, but that the importing country must be prepared to justify their decision. The question of scientific advice versus final political decision, for me, is a very difficult one to address, since the existence of risk, irrespective of the level, may be ultimately unacceptable. 35. The SPS agreement includes the requirement to undertake a risk assessment in these circumstances by stating "the measure be based on a risk assessment, as appropriate to those circumstances, and that the risk assessment takes into account the techniques developed by the relevant international organizations", which for aquatic animal health, is the OIE. In their relevant recommendations at no time is there a requirement to undertake a quantitative exercise. The OIE state that "a risk analysis must be able to deal with the complexities of real life situations and that no single method is applicable in all cases. For this reason, countries wanting to conduct import risk analysis may find it necessary to design their own methodology or their own process for carrying out such an exercise". 36. In summary, from a purely scientific point of view, I agree personally with the AQIS recommendation in the 1995 Draft Report based on a qualitative exercise. I also agree with the disease summaries of the BRS Review and the most recently commissioned quantitative exercise from Canada, which taken together accept that there is a risk and that risk is "low", "exceedingly small" or "negligible" which ever phrase you want to use. There appears to be no argument that a risk exists, none at all. But the key fact for me, is not whether the risk assessment exercises should be qualitative or quantitative, or even whether one report is better than another, because at the end of the day, using similar phrases they all reach a similar conclusion. For me, the key fact is what you do with that information that identifies a certain level of risk, the next step if you like, which in this case, identifies a negligible level of risk. The final decision, after a risk communication exercise which considers additional factors, is going to be a political decision, not a scientific decision. That decision can agree or not with the scientific advice, which identifies as I have said a certain level of risk. Whether that risk is then acceptable, following socio-economic and internal political considerations (to which, fortunately, in this case I am not a party), is not really for me today to say. What I would say though is that additional fears about the acceptability of such a low level of risk should be allayed by considering a series of risk reduction factors. But those risk reduction factors should be accepted by both parties. In this way, the application of such a series of measures may demonstrate that the extent to which risk is reduced is sufficiently great that an accurate assessment of the initial unrestricted risk is unnecessary and here again I quote from the OIE manual. For me, risk assessment is a piece of the process that helps decision makers arrive at a final conclusion, is not an answer in itself. 37. That is all I would like to say except to finally conclude by congratulating both parties on their presentations because analysing and finding the necessary scientific information for this exercise is not easy. I know from experience how difficult it can be, and I would make a plea if you like for them, as the New Zealanders have done to a certain extent, to make that information available following the Panel decision, irrespective of what that decision is, for everybody, because it is extremely valuable information that should be used, possibly through the auspices of the OIE in some way, for anybody else coming after to help support subsequent risk assessment exercises. Thank you Mr. Chairman. Chairman 38. Well thank you very much Dr. Rodgers, perhaps I could continue now with the order and turn the floor over to Dr. Winton. You have the floor. Dr. Winton 39. Well I would like to begin by thanking the Panel for the invitation to attend, I have found this a very interesting exercise. I would also like to state that both parties in this dispute, I regard as friends and I have scientific colleagues in both countries and the amount of effort and time that has been expended is substantial and I second Dr. Rodgers comments that a lot of very good information has been generated in this exercise. I tried to restrict my comments to that of the OIE Fish Diseases Commission for two reasons: partly because I consider this to be a dispute among friends and not to take sides, but secondly because Dr. Blancou the Director-General of the OIE, feels that the OIE should be impartial in these matters and so I have tried to restrict my comments pretty much to areas in which I believe the Fish Diseases Commission has some role. 40. First of all, the Fish Diseases Commission of the OIE and the OIE itself is not necessarily the repository of all information or all judgement on these things. We do not, in fact, sit in judgement, we gather information to the best of our ability through a network of colleagues, reference laboratories and friends, but much of the information generated by both parties and by Dr. Rodgers has been useful to us and we are in the process of learning about this ourselves. We found several of these exercises to really be quite in advance on what we estimated risk assessments might be in the areas of fish diseases, because the Fish Diseases Commission has adopted very much the risk assessment approaches drafted by the OIE itself for large animals and Dr. Wooldridge can comment more about that. But it is an evolving area, it is an area where new scientific information is required in order to develop quantitative assessments, if you do not know survival curves of pathogens, it is difficult to estimate some of the factors that have to go into a quantitative risk assessment, and certainly the OIE recognizes that. 41. The Fish Diseases Commission has, as I said, adopted the approach of the OIE and that is that a risk assessment should be the method by which disputes can be resolved between parties, particularly in the case here of the fish disease. We generally had imagined that such risk assessments would be quantitative to maximum extent possible, and I think, as Dr. Rodgers and Dr. Burmaster have indicated, this is possible. I think the New Zealand and to some extent the Australian and certainly the more recent Canadian reports have gone a long ways towards showing what can be done in the areas of risk assessment. 42. The Fish Diseases Commission has not tried to address every possible disease risk between any possible trading partners because virtually every case has unique elements. Those unique elements have to do with the species in the exporting and the importing countries, the volume of trade, the type of product that might be in trade, etc. But what the Fish Diseases Commission has tried to do is to establish a group of diseases for which there is general agreement that these are significant diseases in worldwide trade. The Fish Diseases Commission has also imagined that the most significant areas of risk involve live fish, live gametes and secondly, uneviscerated products. 43. The OIE Fish Diseases Commission has not considered eviscerated fish to represent a significant risk. But I agree with Dr. Rodgers that probably there is no trade that has zero risk. I think as Dr. Burmaster and Dr. Wooldridge have pointed out, you have a balance between benefits and risks, the only no risk option is no trade. So if there is going to be trade, you can always construct some scenario by which some agent might pass. In an effort to balance this, the Fish Diseases Commission has created a list of Notifiable Diseases which we believe there is general agreement on and a method, or set of standard protocols by which certifications can be obtained for international trade to proceed, primarily in the case of aquaculture products. Outside of that sphere, is a huge grey area which includes the dispute here in question, wild fish or eviscerated fish. For that the OIE Fish Diseases Commission has really not much to say other than, in our view, as a series of experts and based on our evaluation of the scientific literature, we do not find scientific evidence that such eviscerated products have constituted a risk in the past. Should such scientific data be forthcoming, we would perhaps modify the types of products or the types of diseases and it is a very dynamic process, and we probably will never get it completely right. 44. In response to some of the questions then about the Fish Diseases Commission and detailed minutes, etc., and how this body works there are five elected members of the Fish Diseases Commission. We are often joined by one of two experts, Dr. Beers for example attended, I think two years ago one of the sessions and we appreciated his input at that time. We try to invite experts periodically to provide input in areas in which we think we are weak. We are admittedly weak in areas of risk assessment and we rely on the OIE and other authorities such as we have here with us to provide guidance in that area. We are also somewhat weak in areas of crustacean and shellfish diseases and we will invite experts to assist us in some of these areas. But we do have a large network of reference laboratories and colleagues to provide that information. We do not keep detailed minutes of our debates and consultations, they are essentially a consensus agreement, if the five members do not agree, we simply do not do anything for a while until we do agree or we get new information. The minutes that we do provide are somewhat summary in nature and are presented to the general session at which each member country has a voting delegate. So we serve really as a technical body to the OIE itself. 45. I think that ... understand that the OIE Fish Diseases Commission as a subgroup of the OIE is developing essentially as we go and I think this dispute actually has been very informative to us. The OIE code and manual for terrestrial animals and animal diseases has been around for quite a while. Over twenty years ago this approach was imagined to be extended to aquatic animals for which trade was increasing and the Fish Diseases Commission was created. Until the GATT Treaty, the Uruguay Round of GATT, the OIE was not given as much authority in these issues. But following the Uruguay Round of GATT OIE was seen to some extent as a reference body and the Fish Diseases Commission was increased to five members to increase its geographic distribution and to some extent its expertise. We do not represent geographic areas per se and certainly not countries, but we assemble information on the epidemiological situation in various parts of the world and for that some geographic input is important. Certainly we could use experts from other areas of the world including Australia or New Zealand. Presumably our network of reference laboratories, of which we have two in Australia, are important sources of information. 46. I think that I can comment on one or two of the additional questions that the Panel has raised. Dr. Rodgers has expertly answered the question on salmon and steelhead. This is an areas that is of a little bit of debate, the geneticist will tell you that all members of the genus Oncorhynchus are probably closely related, but by convention Pacific salmon are really those traditional species of Pacific salmon that migrate to the ocean and that the rainbow trout, the anadromous form, the steelhead, is seen as a trout, to some extent, so it is in fact a salmonid but perhaps not a Pacific salmon in most people's general agreement. 47. To the other questions, most of which involve risk assessment, I would certainly defer to Dr. Wooldridge or Dr. Burmaster. The 1996 Final Report of Australia, in many ways took into account some of the risk assessment techniques developed by the OIE in that this is an evolving process. We imagined that a risk assessment might be necessary, but in fact the OIE right now is moving along and refining and adapting its techniques, and in fact I think has gone quite a ways farther then some of us who are not familiar with risk assessment methods might have imagined. To that extent, the 1996 Final Report, as Dr. Rodgers I think mentioned, falls short of a quantitative assessment, one that Dr. Burmaster perhaps had argued for. Yet I certainly acknowledge the fact that there are large gaps in the scientific information by which a quantitative risk assessment can be fully done. But I think that the New Zealand Report and perhaps some others have made a good effort given the existing scientific information of trying to quantify those risks, and whether the probability is one in a hundred thousand tones or one in fifty thousand tones, I am sure there is some margin of error. But the idea at least that you can begin to assess probability estimates, I think is important and I think that all of us will be looking towards that approach in the future. At that point I think that will conclude my comments. Chairman 48. Thank you very much Dr. Winton. Perhaps I could now invite Dr. Wooldridge to take the floor. To continue with Australia - Measures Affecting Importation of Salmon: Annex 2, Section 49

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