Committee report on NZ import welfare standards petition misses mark

A select committee has declined to back welfare standards for imported animal products following two petitions. Animal Policy International disagrees - and a legislative route remains open.

In June, the New Zealand Parliament's Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee reported back on two petitions concerning the welfare standards of imported animal products: a petition from Associate Professor Marcelo Rodriguez Ferrere, asking that imports meet or exceed New Zealand's animal welfare standards; and another petition seeking a ban on the import and sale of foie gras. The committee considered them together and recommended only that the House take note of its report. Some members concluded that the risk of trade retaliation was sufficient reason not to advance the requests, although others thought the risk small enough that elements could be tested.

The conclusion does not reflect the weight of the evidence.

Why this matters

New Zealand has banned practices such as sow stalls and battery cages on welfare grounds, yet products made using those same methods can still be imported and sold here. That inconsistency undermines the standards Parliament has set, expectations of the public and it places domestic farmers who meet higher standards at a disadvantage against lower-standard imports. Closing that welfare gap is the principle the petitions asked Parliament to uphold, and it is the principle that around 80 per cent of New Zealanders and farmers consistently support. In 2023 and 2024 surveys, support for aligning import standards with domestic ones outweighed opposition by more than twenty to one.

On trade retaliation

The committee leaned heavily on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade's view that the risk of retaliation "cannot be discounted." Our analysis, set out in Vision Into Action, finds that risk to be low and often overstated. New Zealand represents less than 2 per cent of total pork production and less than 0.3 per cent of egg production for its major exporters, so the commercial incentive to retaliate is slight. More importantly, trade law itself constrains it: for a partner to impose welfare requirements in return, it would first have to establish its own public-morals case in domestic law and then apply the standard equally to all its trading partners, including its own producers. It could not lawfully single out New Zealand. The winter-grazing and shelter concerns raised as a possible pressure point would face the same legal and practical barriers, and do not provide a credible basis for retaliation.

On legality

The committee noted that the European Union's seal products ban, while accepted as pursuing a legitimate public-morals objective, was later found discriminatory. That finding was narrower than it sounds. The WTO Appellate Body did not object to the ban itself: it confirmed that protecting animal welfare can be a legitimate public-morals concern and that the prohibition was provisionally justified as necessary under Article XX(a) of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. What it faulted was the design of the regime's exceptions — chiefly an exception for products from Inuit and other indigenous community hunts that, in practice, gave seal products from Greenland more favourable access to the EU market than like products from Canada and Norway. Because that advantage was not applied even-handedly, the regime failed the "chapeau" of Article XX, which bars measures applied so as to constitute arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination. The flaw therefore lay in the selective exceptions, not in the underlying ban — which is why the European Union brought the regime into compliance in 2015 by amending the exception, rather than abandoning the prohibition. This is a lesson in how to design a measure, not a reason to abandon one. Our legal advice, The Legality of Closing the Welfare Gap (August 2024), concludes that a well-crafted, non-discriminatory measure - in particular a sales ban applied equally to domestic and imported products - would comply with World Trade Organisation obligations under the public-morals exemption in Article XX(a) of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. WTO case law supports this: in the US–Shrimp case the Appellate Body permitted restrictions based on production methods and described the interpretation of trade rules as evolutionary, and the Appellate Body has recognised the right of members to determine for themselves what constitutes public morals in their own societies.

On binding other jurisdictions

The committee considered it unreasonable to expect other jurisdictions to be bound by standards New Zealand sets for itself. Animal Policy International would put it differently: this is not about binding anyone, but about setting the conditions for access to the New Zealand market, applied even-handedly to domestic and imported products alike.

Several countries and regions already do exactly this. California's Proposition 12 sets minimum welfare standards for the pork, eggs and veal sold in the state, regardless of where they are produced, and was upheld by the US Supreme Court in 2023. The European Union's ban on the sale of seal products - upheld by the World Trade Organisation on public-morals grounds - together with its bans on importing cat and dog fur and cetacean products, are long-standing examples of market access conditioned on ethical concerns. 

The direction of travel reinforces the point. In its 2025 Vision for Agriculture and Food, the European Union committed to applying the same standards to imported products as to those produced within the bloc. Requiring imports to meet domestic welfare standards would place New Zealand alongside this trend, not outside it.

Where this goes next

The committee's report is a step in a parliamentary process that continues.

We welcome the parts of the committee's report that point forward: its acknowledgement that this is a live and actively discussed issue, the openness of some members to testing elements of the requests, and its encouragement of continued work through trade channels, the World Organisation for Animal Health, and country-of-origin labelling. Labelling and diplomacy have a role, but on their own they leave the welfare gap in place.

The clearest route remains legislation. The Animal Products (Closing the Welfare Gap) Amendment Bill, a member's bill in the name of Green MP Steve Abel, sits in the members' ballot — the "biscuit tin" — and, if drawn, would give Parliament the opportunity to close this gap directly.