02/13/06 What the biotech ruling means to the US

After at least two delays, the World Trade Organization finally announced its ruling on an European Union moratorium on genetically modified crops. The W.T.O. last week announced the moratorium violated international trade rules. And according to American Farm Bureau Federation trade specialist Michelle Gorman, the ruling spelled out that if there is to be such bans, it has to be at least on sound science, and not on potential concerns, and at worse, a convenient trade barrier. GORMAN: You're allowed to look after the health and safety of your population of your environment, but you have to prove scientifically in a reasonable period of time, why you want to keep a product out, and the European Union didn't do that in the case of biotech products. And the points of victory for the U.S., Canada, and Argentina, which filed the initial complaint to the W.T.O., include the lifting of a moratorium that has proven costly, especially in the case of U.S. agriculture, which has long been a world leader in the development of biotech and G.M.O. products. GORMAN: Prior to the moratorium going on in 1998, we were shipping on average about $300 million dollars on corn annually into the European Union, and the moratorium effectively halted this trade. But more importantly was the message sent by the W.T.O. ruling that there were no scientific findings to show biotech crops as unsafe, and therefore, such products should not be placed under such a trade barrier & a message that other nations should take heed in. GORMAN: The United States grows a lot of biotech products, especially cotton, soybean, and corn. And there was a growing concern that the European Union was being too slow to act on approving those products. And this was causing huge trade problems for us into the European Union, but there was also a growing concern that other countries might start to follow the European Union's way. So does that mean the lifting of the E.U. moratorium will mean a dramatic increase of U.S. biotech crop exports to Europe? Gorman says the answer is no. GORMAN: Even if we remove the moratorium and we have an approval process for biotech products, we still got a system in place which discriminates against biotech products in the European Union marketplace, so the next step is to take a case on more E.U. biotech regulations.