Most Favoured Nation

Most Favoured Nation refers to the principle of treating other people equally under the WTO agreements – countries cannot normally discriminate between their trading partners such as by offering tariff free trade to a single country or individual bloc.  The significance of this is that if the UK decide to offer tariff free access to its markets to EU countries, for instance to prevent consumer price increases, it must offer the same deal to all countries provided they can meet the same sanitary and phytosanitary conditions.