Strengthening the Compliance of the OIC Member States
to International Standards
29
There are a number of potentially useful points of practice that come from the varying experience of OIC
member states with mutual recognition of conformity assessment. First, although agreements are
desirable, they are not necessary, as the interesting case of Qatar demonstrates. For small economies,
there is much to recommend the Qatari approach of according unilateral recognition to laboratories of
international standard. This approach should be attractive to those OIC member states that do not have
any, or many, mutual recognition agreements.
The second point that emerges strongly is the regional dimension, for countries like Malaysia and
Senegal. Both regions—the Asia-Pacific and West Africa—have initiatives on testing and certification,
although they are much better developed in the first region than in the second, where they are as yet
nascent. The regional approach has much to commend it, in particular for small, developing countries.
Some OIC countries do not have large populations or economies, and therefore attract only small import
volumes in global terms. There may not be sufficient business to keep testing laboratories profitable in a
competitive environment, in particular given the costs of acquiring accreditation from an appropriate
organization. Proceeding regionally can offer a way past these kinds of difficulties, as it effectively allows
countries to pool resources. Laboratories can serve a number of countries instead of just one, thereby
benefitting from economies of scale and, potentially, scope. Although it has been difficult to get the
system off the ground in West Africa, the Asia Pacific example is instructive: higher income countries can
use regional arrangements as a vehicle for the delivery of technical assistance and capacity building to
less developed countries in the region. There is clear scope for the more advanced OIC countries to play
a leadership role in this area, in terms of developing unilateral and mutual recognition arrangements in
the context of regional standardization efforts in the developing world.
3.3 Regional Initiatives
As the previous subsection and the case studies in Section 6 make clear, OIC member states are involved
in various regional initiatives in the area of standards. For the Asia-Pacific, the relevant structures are
analyzed in the case studies of ASEAN and APEC, two groups that include OIC member states. For Egypt,
there are the various regional integration initiatives in the Arab region, such as PAFTA, which requires
action on non-tariff barriers including product standards that fall into that category. Similarly, for
Senegal there is the ARCO initiative on African standards, as well as UEMOA work on harmonization in
the West African sub-regional context. Finally, for Bangladesh there is SARSO, a specialized body of the
relevant regional integration organization dealing with standards issues. As these examples show, OIC
member states in all country groups are variously involved in regional initiatives, more or less
developed, dealing with standards. One notable initiative is the GCC Standardization Organization (GSO),
an initiative of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, which are also OIC member states. The GSO is
active in a number of areas relevant to international standards. On the one hand, it has a number of