‘Sriracha’ sauce: is it what it says on the bottle?

Image: Si Racha coast; sauces from left: Sriraja Panich, Huy Fong/Rooster, Flying Goose, Three Mountains, Exotic Food (USA style)

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Sriracha

— Jay Rayner (@jayrayner1) September 26, 2020

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By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED MAY 29, 2023 | UPDATED MAY 31, 2023

Parts on the history of Sriracha sauce have been revised considerably (May 31, 2023) following further research into Thai-language material

Fancy a Japanese seafood omelette with “mayo spun through with sriracha”? Smoked cod head “doused in a sriracha emulsion”? How about McDonald’s sriracha-and-kale burger, described as “an aging hipster’s cry for help”? Or just sausages and brown sauce mixed with sriracha in proportions of 5:1.

Sriracha is gaining popularity among chefs and people who just enjoy their food. But what exactly is it?

First, you may have noticed that “Trade β Blog” is about trade. So this piece is not about the joys of eating or cooking with the distinctive chilli sauce. It’s about a controversial issue in trade: the use of a geographical name to identify a product. But it does include some blind tasting in the search for authenticity.

Second, you might also have noticed that all those quotes at the beginning use “sriracha” spelt with a lowercase “s”, as if it were just an ordinary noun.

In a sense it is. But Sriracha (officially Si Racha) is also very much a name. For a start, it’s a town and small port originally built around a sawmill and fishing communities, about 100km southeast of Bangkok, on the way to the resort of Pattaya and next door to what is now Thailand’s Eastern Seaboard industrial complex.

It’s the town where the sauce originally came from and where it got its name.

Later a version of the sauce was produced and marketed in the US by a Vietnamese immigrant who had nothing to do with the Thai town but achieved what is hailed as “a classic American success story”.

That success is more about marketing, financial clout and filling a gap, and perhaps less about the quality of the product (more below). Think of US Parmesan — although US Sriracha is perhaps not so bad.

WTO agriculture negotiators face challenge of thinking outside the box(es)

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED OCTOBER 23, 2022 | UPDATED OCTOBER 24, 2022

See also the report on the retreat (published October 26, 2022):
WTO agriculture retreat said strong on context but weak on give-and-take

Brain-storming. Blue sky thinking. Wiping the slate clean. Thinking outside the box. Pick your cliché. World Trade Organization (WTO) members’ ambassadors and agriculture attachés go on a “retreat” tomorrow (October 24) as they try to discover solutions where none have been found for over a decade.

The common impression is that the WTO agriculture negotiations have achieved nothing since they started almost a quarter of a century ago in 2000.

This is partly because after just over a year (in 2001), the talks were rolled into the newly launched and broader Doha Round of WTO negotiations. And now the Doha Round is widely considered to be dead.

Officially the position is more complicated. Some members say the Doha Round is over. Others say the original mandate continues — they refuse to endorse the end of the round.

In practice some parts of the Doha Round have been concluded, such as the Trade Facilitation and Fisheries Subsidies agreements. Other parts are in limbo or the talks have dried up, at least among the full membership. What has faded away is the idea of the talks as one unified package or “single undertaking”.

(An aside here. What almost no one has noticed is that the Trade Negotiations Committee of the WTO membership — with the director-general ex officio in the chair — still meets. This committee was set up specifically within the Doha Round. If the round has ended so should the Trade Negotiations Committee. That would also mean the director-general has no official position in any council or committee of the WTO membership.)

UPDATES: expanding the WTO intellectual property waiver for COVID-19

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By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED OCTOBER 4, 2022 | UPDATED AS INDICATED

The waiver on patent protection for COVID-19 vaccines was agreed at the WTO Ministerial Conference on June 17, 2022. The text with brief explanations is here. The waiver is not an obligation. Countries can choose to suspend certain patent rights if they want.

Much of the work after the Ministerial Conference results from a provision for WTO members to decide within six months (by December 17, 2022) whether or not to expand the waiver to include COVID-19 tests and treatments:

“No later than six months from the date of this Decision, Members will decide on its extension to cover the production and supply of COVID-19 diagnostics and therapeutics”

Background: The original (revised) proposal; the debate; the proposed compromise and analysis.

Updates on the latest developments will be added here, with links to new documents and news items. That will include any notifications from countries changing their laws to apply the waiver. So far there are none.

Key events

• December 20, 2022 — The General Council agrees on postponing the deadline with no date set, but to be reconsidered in the Spring
• December 19, 2022 — The General Council postpones a decision on postponing the deadline
• December 17, 2022 — deadline for expansion decision missed, so far no country has moved to use the vaccine patent waiver agreed in June
• December 16, 2022 — formal meeting: chair’s draft binned, replaced by short paragraph postponing the deadline
• December 7, 2022 — chair’s draft factual report circulated
• December 6, 2022 — informal meeting discusses proponents’ draft and postponing deadline
• December 5–6, 2022 — US announces it will need time to consult stakeholders
• November 2, 2022 — informal meeting, with members’ positions on expanding the waiver to tests and treatments crystallised into three groups
• July 6, 2022 — first meeting after the vaccine patent waiver decision, followed by stock-taking and informal meetings

(TRIPS = trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights, the official description of intellectual property issues that are discussed in the WTO — they should be “trade-related” issues)

Alternative to the alternative: Turkey and EU use arbitration for WTO appeals

This has now been republished as
“Türkiye and EU: appeal-by-arbitration cases leave questions about WTO law — Similar to the 50-member ‘Multi-party Interim Appeal Arrangement (MPIA)’, one ruling has been formally adopted, the other not”

Ukraine invasion—what Russia and Belarus face in the WTO system: so far

This blog post contains a list of actions that countries have taken against Russia and Belarus. It will now only be updated occasionally. The point was to examine how they work, where WTO decisions might be needed and the implications, and how they relate to WTO provisions such as non-discrimination (MFN) or the security exceptions. That should be clearer now.

See these sources for closer monitoring:

Global Trade Alert

A considerably longer list of sanctions announced against Russia is available at Global Trade Alert. Many are outside the WTO system. Some may be within the system, such as export restrictions on dual-use products and restrictions on shipping services (but not air traffic rights). Russia’s retaliation is here.

Global Trade Alert was originally set up by Simon Evenett and his team at St Gallen University, Switzerland. It is now run by an independent foundation.

PIIE

Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) has created a timeline that tracks all the actions taken by various countries on all sides: Russia’s war on Ukraine: A sanctions timeline.

A number of other sources are available. This one (details paywalled) is Europe-centred.

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By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED MARCH 4, 2022 | UPDATED MAY 10, 2022 (SEE ALSO ENTRY DATES)

This is a summary of actions taken or proposed so far against Russia within the WTO system. Some are also against Belarus, which is not a WTO member.

They are deliberately described as “within the WTO system” and not “in the WTO” — or worse “by the WTO” — to avoid confusion.

US politicians call for trade action against Russia in the WTO

Painting (detail) by Chris Edmund © used with permission

See also:
List of measures announced or proposed
that come under the WTO system, periodically updated
Can a WTO member be expelled? No. But …

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED FEBRUARY 28, 2022 | UPDATED MARCH 4, 2022

Two senior US politicians announced on February 25, 2022 that they were introducing legislation to suspend World Trade Organization terms in US trade with Russia and to seek expelling Russia from the WTO.

Lloyd Doggett, chair of the House of Representatives Ways and Means subcommittee on health, and Earl Blumenauer, his counterpart on the subcommittee on trade, proposed the bill following Russia’s “unprovoked invasion of Ukraine”.

Since then, at least three similar bills have been proposed in the US Senate.

Meanwhile, Ukraine and Canada have actually implemented action against Russia within in the WTO system, and the EU has said it is considering its own action.

The Doggett and Blumenauer bill would make it easier for the US to impose trade sanctions against imports of Russian goods, in addition to the commercial, financial and personal sanctions the US and its allies have already initiated. That includes new EU sanctions in trade with Belarus (not a WTO member).

The bill would also “seek the suspension of the Russian Federation’s membership in the WTO”, a more difficult prospect.

The WTO is regularly in crisis, but this time could be different

New dates
On February 23, 2022, WTO members meeting as the General Council
agreed to reschedule the Ministerial Conference for the week of June 13

The Ministerial Conference had been “postponed indefinitely” on November 26, four days before it was due to start, as Switzerland tightened travel restrictions because of the new omicron COVID-19 variant

By Peter Ungphakorn and Robert Wolfe
POSTED OCTOBER 30 AND NOVEMBER 26, 2021 | ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY COSMOPOLITAN GLOBALIST SEPTEMBER 28, 2021 | UPDATED FEBRUARY 24, 2022

On December 8, 2019, The New York Times predicted the possible “end of the […] World Trade Organization itself.” Earlier, a Bloomberg headline spoke of a “fatal blow” to the WTO.

Two years later, the WTO is still up and running. Even the crisis in dispute settlement, where first-stage rulings can no longer be appealed — the cause of those doom-mongering news reports — has failed to stop it.

Yet the WTO does face serious problems. Dealing with them has become more urgent.

This piece was originally published in September. We are now only days away from when WTO ministers are due to meet in Geneva, where “WTO reform” is a major item on the agenda.

We have heard various upbeat statements from events like the G20 trade ministers’ October 12 meeting in Sorrento, the G7 ministers in London 10 days later, the optimistic sounds coming from Geneva, and apparently a new signal from Washington.

A cacophony of cans being kicked down the road

As the November 30–December 3 Ministerial Conference approached, activity increased, including from some ministers.

The US strengthened its call to talk.

Canadian Trade Minister Mary Ng visited Geneva to rally delegations to produce “concrete outcomes on key initiatives” at the Ministerial Conference. She met the Ottawa Group of members working on WTO reform, the WTO director-general, the chair of the fisheries subsidies negotiations, ambassadors from India, South Africa, EU and Mauritius, and the US chargé d’affaires.

Nevertheless, the only likely deal to be struck is on services regulation among a small group of members. We are also told a last-minute WTO-wide breakthrough on fisheries subsidies might be possible — after 20 years of negotiation and at least one missed deadline. In reality a lot of difficult issues still remain at the last minute.

Aside from those two subjects, we remain sceptical that anything substantial will be delivered.

Continue reading or jump down the page to:
Round the clock activity | No stranger to crisis | The misunderstood role of the WTO | Dispute settlement | The real problem: low priority | ‘Reform’ and the ministerial conference | Two strands of WTO reform | Find out more

See also: Hamid Mamdouh — WTO reform imperative: a possible way forward

One to watch: Bolivia’s bid to import a Canadian COVID-19 vaccine

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED MAY 12, 2021 | UPDATED MAY 12, 2021

News broke late yesterday (May 11, 2021) that a Canadian company, Biolyse Pharma, had agreed to supply Bolivia with 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen vaccine for COVID-19, without the patent-owner’s permission.

But the deal cannot go ahead until the Canadian government issues a “compulsory licence” for Biolyse Pharma to make the vaccine in Canada and export it to Bolivia.

Although the objective is to get a cheaper version of the vaccine to a developing country — Bolivia — a lot of the focus will be on Canada, which now holds the key.

Yes, the WTO needs fixing—but not the way this NY Times piece imagines

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED DECEMBER 27, 2020 | UPDATED DECEMBER 28, 2020

There’s a little anecdote on the World Trade Organization’s website, right at the start of “Understanding the WTO”. As the name suggests, “Understanding” is the principal explainer of how the WTO works. The anecdote goes:

Participants in a recent radio discussion on the WTO were full of ideas. The WTO should do this, the WTO should do that, they said.
     One of them finally interjected: “Wait a minute. The WTO is a table. People sit round the table and negotiate. What do you expect the table to do?”

If we keep that in mind as we read Farah Stockman’s New York Times opinion piece (“The W.T.O. Is Having a Midlife Crisis”, December 17, 2020), then it’s easier to see why so much of the piece is wrong.

Arbitration — the stop-gap when WTO appeals are unavailable

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED AUGUST 4, 2020 | UPDATED APRIL 13, 2022

On August 3, 2020, a group of 50 World Trade Organization members — 30% of the membership — announced that an alternative arrangement was up and running, as a means of getting round a blockage preventing formal appeals in WTO dispute settlement.

Developed gradually since early 2019, the system would retain countries’ ability to get a second opinion after a first-stage “panel” ruling, through arbitration instead of going through the non-functioning Appellate Body.

But unlike a standard appeal, the outcome of the arbitration would not be formally adopted by the WTO’s membership, and therefore would not be part of official WTO law — at least not with the same weight as a full appeal.

On October 6, 2022, the first case was appealed. Less than three months later on December 21, it produced the first arbitration appeal ruling.