The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) would on Wednesday launch an Early Warning System service for South African exporters, which would alert them on potential technical barriers to trade that could be imposed by other countries.

It would also encourage a more unified response to these potential barriers.

In addition to coping with numerous physical barriers to trade, the DTI said that exporters from developing countries, continually faced non-tariff barriers in the form of standards, technical regulations and conformity assessment procedures, which could create technical barriers to trade (TBT) for exports.

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) TBT transparency principle required that countries publish technical regulations before they were entered into force, and that a reasonable time should be allowed for comment and for consideration of the comments prior to the adoption of a final technical regulation.

As a result, the Department pledged to support the South African exporters as part of the second Industrial Policy Action Plan (Ipap2), through an Early Warning System that would track, acquire, review and disseminate information on technical regulations put forward by other countries and that were relevant to South African industry sectors.

The system would entail sending incoming notifications to a dedicated industry and stakeholder mailing list for information. Should there be a South African interest the full texts of TBT notifications, these could be requested through an enquiry point.

The system would also develop a South African national position, or comments that may be submitted to the relevant country by the DTI, resulting in bilateral talks with the country in question if concerns were not taken into consideration.

If bilateral talks did not resolve the problem, it may be registered as a specific trade concern in the WTO TBT Committee meetings, and if the matter could not be resolved and an unnecessary barrier to trade was created, the WTO dispute settlement mechanism may be engaged.