EU Fear-Mongers’ Lethal Harvest

Millions of starving people in Zimbabwe have the European Union to thank for their hunger. In early July, Zimbabwe rejected food aid from the United States because the corn involved had been genetically enhanced to protect it against insects. The decision wasn’t based on science. This current threat of mass starvation is the direct consequence of a trade war over genetically improved crops that is brewing between the United States and Europe.

Zimbabwe has refused biotech corn because its government fears that Europe would ban its agricultural exports if its farmers started growing genetically improved maize. After all, since the mid-1990s, the EU has banned the importation of genetically engineered crops from the United States, claiming--entirely speciously--that they aren’t safe.

One scientific panel after another has concluded that biotech foods are safe to eat, and so has the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Even an EU review issued last fall of 81 separate European scientific studies of genetically modified organisms found no evidence that genetically modified foods posed any new risks to human health or the environment. The European commissioner for health and consumer protection, David Byrne, acknowledged last October: “There is an irrational fear of GM food in the EU.”

It’s clear that the EU ban is not so much a safety precaution as a barrier to trade. The EU is citing phony safety concerns to protect its farmers from competition and to protect its system of bloated farm subsidies.

For more than a decade the EU has banned the importation of American beef treated with growth hormones. In 1997, the World Trade Organization (WTO) ruled that the EU’s ban was not based on scientific evidence, but instead was a trade barrier. Rather than allow the beef imports, the EU chose to accept countervailing duties on more than $100 million of its exports to the United States.

Fearing that the WTO would rule against their biotech crop ban, the Europeans are now trying to execute an end run around the WTO. Currently, the WTO requires that regulations be “based on scientific principles” and that they not be “maintained without sufficient scientific evidence.” The European strategy to circumvent the clear language of the agreement is twofold: to require labels on all food products that contain ingredients made from biotech crops and to get a sort of “precautionary principle” accepted as an international food and health safety standard. The precautionary principle is an anti-science regulatory concept that allows regulators to ban new products or technologies on the barest suspicion that they might pose some unknown threat. It is an approach of “impose a ban first, ask questions later.”

The Europeans are trying to smuggle in the precautionary principle via negotiations in two other international forums, the Codex Alimentarius Commission and the new Biosafety Protocol. The former is an intergovernmental body aimed at setting food standards under the auspices of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization and World Health Organization. In 1995, the SPS agreement conferred on the codex commission the responsibility for setting international food safety standards that would be recognized by the WTO. The EU has succeeded in getting the codex commission to incorporate the precautionary principle as well as traceability requirements into several draft documents on risk and biotechnology.

If the codex commission adopts those rules, it would mean that WTO must accept them. And that means if the United States asks the WTO to adjudicate its dispute with the EU over the banning of biotech crop imports, America would lose.

Meanwhile, the EU-backed Biosafety Protocol would require that all international shipments of genetically modified crops bear the label “May contain living modified organisms.” This in turn would require that biotech crops be segregated from conventional crops, which means duplicating the entire shipping infrastructure of grain silos, rail cars, ships and so forth at an estimated cost of at least $4 billion. The price of grain, it is estimated, would rise by 12%. Unfortunately, the Biosafety Protocol, which becomes effective after being ratified by 50 nations, has already been ratified by more than 30 countries.

What can the United States do to win this trade war and foster the spread of GM foods? Fortunately, U.S. negotiators can stop the codex commission process. Its standards must be agreed to by consensus of all the parties. All the U.S. has to do is call a halt to the precautionary principle, biotech labeling and traceability requirements, and they’ll be taken out of the codex commission.

Countering the absurd regulations of the Biosafety Protocol is a thornier problem. U.S. trade officials must make it clear that importing countries that also grow biotech crops, such as China and India, cannot set a double standard requiring traceability and labeling of U.S. imports while exempting their own crops. The U.S. should be able to show in the WTO that such double standards are trade barriers, not safety regulations.

Furthermore, the U.S. State Department and Office of the U.S. Trade Representative must persuade major food-exporting countries such as Argentina, Australia and Brazil to create a united front against the EU, leaving Europe with no sources for nonbiotech feed grain imports.

Finally, the U.S. needs to devise a set of model biosafety regulations so that developing countries will not simply adopt onerous EU-style regulations by default.

To protect their farmers from competition, the Eurocrats seem willing to wreck the WTO and incidentally starve millions in the developing world. The United States must prevent that.