Check out Vanadana Shiva's article about India's Proposed Food Safety & Standards Bill. One excerpt:

While food hazards grow, food safety laws are being shaped which deregulate large corporations and over-regulate the small scale self organized economy. Such industrial food safety standards promote large scale globalised production, and act against local foods. These laws are also the basis of the Sanitary and Phyto Sanitary Agreement of WTO.

Shiva is one of the best critics of the WTO and this article is a case in point. However, in focusing on the WTO, she overlooks corporate para-state institutions like EurepGAP, which actually bypass the WTO by one-upping it on free market rhetoric by suggesting that their policies merely reflect the demands of its ("sovereign"?) consumer base.

According to the Business Standard entitled `EU standards bleed Indian traders':

In some cases, the cost of complying with the EU standards [i.e. EurepGAP] is as high as 65 per cent of the production cost of the goods, with the high cost of EU compliance certificates and the lack of availability of certifying agencies in the country making exporting to the EU difficult, the survey said.

Note that even though Eurep, which operates EurepGAP, is a consortium of entirely private firms, this article in the Business Standard basically equates exporting to EurepGAP to exporting to the EU.

So claims a poultry extension agent at Purdue, who cites the dangers of cockfighting,"multiple species", and Asians who "sleep closely" with their fowl as reasons why the American vertically integrated, closed-off industrial system is safer.

B.S., says Mike Davis, who recently on Democracy Now argued that the threat of Avian Flu is greatly increased by both the power of industrial poultry agribusiness and the new ecology of industrial poultry farming. What we have seen, he says, is the

"generalization around the world of the American model of poultry production, the Tyson model. Tyson is the giant poultry producer, one of the most exploitative corporations in the United States with just an appalling record of working conditions. Tyson kills several billion chickens a year. It's created huge conurbations of chickens, unprecedented concentrations of chickens.

Now this model has spread to East Asia. China has become the biggest consumer of poultry in the world, and the leading company involved in China is a Thai-based firm called C.P., which has used the Tyson model, a vertical integration of concentrating poultry in enormous warehouses. And it was directly involved in the Thai government's cover-up of the initial outbreak of avian flu in Thailand last year. The industrialization of poultry, above all, has sped up the evolution of influenza. It's changed the nature of disease by changing its ecology."