[WTO Case Review Series No.15] India—Measures Concerning the Importation of Certain Agricultural Products (WT/DS430): Toward the implementation of sanitary and phytosanitary measures based on regionalization

India adopted measures that prohibit the importation of various agricultural products, mainly livestock and poultry products, into India from those countries reporting the occurrence of notifiable avian influenza (NAI), which is composed of both highly pathogenic notifiable avian influenza (HPNAI) and low pathogenicity notifiable avian influenza (LPNAI), to the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE). India's AI measures are not designed to take into account the difference in AI risks regarding those products that are derived from AI-free areas or compartments within the territory of NAI-reporting countries, nor to adapt the measures to the difference of AI risks. Rather, India's AI measures prohibit the importation of those products on a country-wide basis. In other words, India's AI measures are not structured on the basis of the principle of "regionalization" required by the "OIE Terrestrial Animal Health Code," which is considered to be the international standards under the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement). Thus, the United States initiated the proceedings before the WTO dispute settlement procedure with respect to the consistency of India's AI measures with the SPS Agreement. After an overview of the Panel and the Appellate Body Reports of the current dispute, this paper aims to explore how the adoption of the SPS measures based on the principle of regionalization is implicitly required in relation to the substantive obligations under the SPS Agreement (e.g., Articles 2, 3, 5), in addition to the procedural requirement reflected in Article 6 of the SPS Agreement.