January 16, 2004
Source:
OsterDowJones
Commodity News via
Checkbiotech.org
As the European Union prepares to
launch new laws in April to label and track all genetically
modified food, U.S. farmers and government officials are warning
they may turn out to be stronger trade barriers than the biotech
approval ban they are intended to replace.
Only nine biotech agriculture
commodity varieties had been cleared for consumption by the EU
when it shut down the approval process in 1998. That, according
to U.S. Trade Representative
(USTR) Robert Zoellick, has cost U.S. exporters "a few hundred
million dollars...a year" in corn sales alone.
The U.S., in comparison, has approved more than 50, according to
the Biotechnology Industry Organization.
The EU has promised the U.S. for years it would lift its ban on
new biotech crops so long as labeling and record-keeping
regulations could be implemented.
But trade and biotech counselor for the
USDA David Hegwood said the
regulations may be impossible to comply with. "What's not clear
about this regulation is whether it's going to require exporters
to identify the specific (biotech traits) in a corn shipment,"
Hegwood said. "We've got know way of knowing. We don't know how
we're going to deal with that."
USDA Chief Economist Keith Collins said he expects the impact on
U.S. agriculture to be "significant," but declined to make a
precise forecast. "No one knows how the E.U.'s regulations will
be implemented and enforced, thus estimates of economic impacts
(on U.S. exports) are not possible at this point," he said.
Craig Ratajczyk, director of trade analysis for the American
Soybean Association, said effects are already being felt because
European food companies are replacing traditional U.S.
ingredients such as soyoil or corn oil with alternatives such as
palm oil from Malaysia to avoid labeling problems.
USDA's Hegwood said, "Labeling is a problem for us primarily
because the food companies have said they don't want to label
their brand name products because they think consumers won't buy
them if they do. We have no reason to doubt that would be the
case."
That may be because USDA research shows that even U.S.
consumers, generally considered to be far less concerned about
the safety of genetically modified food, were less willing to
buy groceries if they were labeled as containing biotech
ingredients.
Tony Van der hagen, minister counselor for the European
Commission in the U.S. said he expects sales of the biotech
corn-containing food products, allowed into the EU because of
their pre-moratorium approval, will likely suffer when they are
forced to bear GMO labels.
The labels, he said, will be necessary to maintain European
consumer confidence in the food they eat, especially in the
years to come as companies produce pharmaceuticals through
genetic manipulation of plants.
In the event that pharmaceutical-growing plants ever got mixed
with food or feed varieties, the ability to trace back the
origin of those crops will be even more critical, Van der hagen
said.
U.S. farm groups say they would like to see the U.S. file suit
in the World Trade Organization against the new EU biotech
regulations, but Hegwood said the USDA and USTR are still do not
know if they should.
American Farm Bureau Federation President Bob Stallman said he
has no doubt that a WTO suit is needed. In a letter to President
George Bush, Stallman complained, "Replacing one non-WTO
compliant action with another non-WTO compliant solution is not
acceptable."
If indeed the decision is made to challenge the new E.U. laws,
USDA's Hegwood said the U.S. will move much quicker than the
five years it took to dispute the approval moratorium. The U.S.
continued to hold off on challenging the moratorium, Hegwood
said, because of repeated EU promises to begin approving new
biotech commodities again. He said that mistake will not be made
again.
"We always accepted ... that the moratorium was temporary, it
just gone on way too long," he said. "They always said it was
temporary, but (the new laws) are permanent." |