Collective valuation of common good through consumption: What is (un)lawful in mandatory country-of-origin labelling of non-food products?

Abstract This chapter aims to assess whether the concept of
sustainable consumption would support a reinterpretation of
relevant trade law—namely EU and WTO rules—to allow robust
and harmonious country-of-origin (COO) labelling. Some—but
only some—consumers have a bias towards goods and services
produced locally, which relatively recent opinion polling confirms.
Nevertheless, 40 percent of the EU population, when polled,
signals a willingness to pay more for goods ‘produced under
certain social and environmental standards’, and roughly a fifth
claim that the origin of products affects their everyday purchase
decisions.
A product’s COO arguably works as a proxy for social and
environmental standards in its production. COO is also material
product information in itself, especially in light of product safety
statistics. EU case law on the (discriminatory) requirements of
COO indication has traditionally been interpreted as holding
mandatory COO requirements to be ‘obviously illegal’. To uphold
national COO labelling measures, defences based on consumer
protection and the fairness of commercial transactions have been
rejected as ‘equally applicable in form only’. This is despite the
fact that a duty to disclose COO arguably already exists in EU law
and the European Commission continues to pursue harmonised
mandatory COO labelling rules for non-food products. Under WTO
law, mandatory COO labelling—understood as information on
processes and production methods (PPMs)—is a suspect
category of trade barrier. Assessment of its lawfulness may fall
under Article XX GATT and Article 2 of the Agreement on
Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT). Hence the legality of
mandatory COO labelling under both EU and WTO law remains
unclear