Club of bologna proceedings

Jean Marie DEBOIS 
OECD 
I’ve heard the four letters OECD mentioned 
many times here, and I could probably speak 
very long but I won’t. I would specifically like to 
talk about the subsidising of testing, just to say 
that in OECD we have the whole range of situa-
tions. My left hand neighbour from Australia 
will forgive me for saying that in OECD there 
are 5 countries, including Australia, which 
benefit from OECD testing but don’t participate 
so don’t pay: Australia, New Zealand, Mexico 
and Hungary - the new member countries. 
OECD covers all western and central European 
countries, plus Turkey, Japan, Korea, USA and 
Canada. I think you all know that the situation 
in North America is that not only testing but test 
approval by OECD, and also I must say the 
OECD secretariat, is paid for by industry 100%. 
There are other countries - probably mostly in 
Europe and, as we heard, in Japan also - where 
the cost is supported by government. This que-
stion comes up every now and then in OECD, 
but this is not part of our agreement I would 
say, so I need not expand on that. I think basi-
cally the philosophy is that either you do testing 
to protect the farmer or to help to serve the ma-
nufacturers. And the former case is more for 
domestic results of testing, while the other is 
more for favouring expanding international tra-
de. I think both philosophies are equally valid. 
But I will finish my comment by calling joint at-
tention to another aspect of testing, which is the 
benefits that should derive from testing. I have a 
very concrete and clear example: this Thursday 
I am going to Geneva, because the WTO com-
mittee for technical barriers to trade would like 
to hear about the kind of standardisation activi-
ties carried out by OECD. And OECD has been 
selected as one of 10 world-wide international 
standardising bodies. So I will say what I belie-
ve the OECD codes bring to manufacturers and 
to farmers alike. I think that when they see the 
list of countries belonging to the OECD codes - 
they will see it is a benefit for countries even if 
those countries are funded by manufacturers.