Regulatory Imperialism by Proxy: How the EU-UK SPS Convergence Intensifies the Compliance Burden on ECOWAS Agri-Food Exporters and What WTO Law Must Do about It

Abstract

The 2025 UK-EU SPS Agreement negotiations, premised on the United Kingdom’s dynamic alignment with EU food safety law, have been analysed extensively from the perspective of UK-EU relations. This article argues that existing scholarship has been systematically inattentive to the third-party consequences of that convergence: specifically, the way in which a consolidated and expanding Euro-Atlantic SPS regime intensifies what this article terms a dual compliance burden on agri-food exporters from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Building on Anu Bradford’s Brussels Effect thesis, this article advances an original doctrinal argument: the de facto extraterritorial extension of EU SPS standards, now amplified by UK re-alignment, operates as a form of regulatory imperialism by proxy—one that the WTO SPS Agreement’s existing disciplines, including special and differential treatment under Article 10 and the precautionary principle under Article 5.7, are structurally incapable of correcting. The article locates the failure not merely in ECOWAS institutional incapacity, which prior scholarship has emphasised, but in a doctrinal lacuna within WTO SPS law itself: the absence of any mechanism to assess the cumulative and disproportionate trade effects of converging major trading partners’ SPS standards on structurally dependent developing regional blocs. The article proposes a doctrinal reform path—a Cumulative SPS Impact Assessment (CSIA) obligation—as a necessary corrective within the WTO SPS framework, drawing on analogies from the WTO’s Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures and the emerging principle of systemic trade equity.