The challenges you mention are significant, and they cost importers and exporters a lot of money. Once someone has control of a regulatory function—“we own this and you own that”—they're very reluctant to give it up. Regulators are also charged with defending the safety of their domestic consumers, not promoting international trade. It's tough to unmake that.
The NAFTA does contain a number of “best efforts” provisions to encourage harmonization of standards and working groups on technical barriers, but what the NAFTA lacked was high-level political attention to actually rooting out some of these barriers. The regulatory cooperation council, the RCC initiative that was launched in 2011, has been much more effective in getting regulators and businesses at the table, with a mandate to make things happen.
I was speaking to a woman who is involved in both the RCC and in the NAFTA with her particular product. She says that she's had much better results through the RCC because of that political attention, and she only wishes that we could have the same process with Mexico on a trilateral level, because the NAFTA process never worked out as intended.
We need that intention and that political leadership trilateralized, I think, to work better.