If the Winter Olympics were to award medals for anti-biotech hysteria, the Europeans probably would sweep the gold, silver, and bronze. And they wouldn’t even need help from the French judge.
But this event features fool’s gold--and perhaps finally the time has come to watch it go the way of tug-of-war (which was eliminated as an Olympic sport after 1920). That’s because a momentous ruling from the World Trade Organization may help make it obsolete. According to press reports, a WTO dispute panel has determined that the European Union was wrong to impose a moratorium on GM foods for six years.
This is excellent news, because defeat would have been catastrophic. It would have meant that countries could exclude biotech products from their markets for reasons that would have made less sense than figure-skating scores.
That’s essentially what a few European countries were doing: They were letting special interests dictate their policies, rather than sound science and international trade rules.
Yet the tug of war, so to speak, between logic and illogic is far from over. The problem is, although the friends of biotechnology couldn’t afford to lose the WTO decision, the enemies of biotechnology could afford the loss. But, they certainly aren’t happy about their defeat. Groups such as Greenpeace are complaining about violations of national sovereignty, as if national sovereignty was something they cared about more than 15 minutes ago.
The loss was acceptable for these neo-Luddites because European consumers remain skittish about biotechnology. Unfortunately, many ordinary Europeans still don’t trust what modern science tells them about the safety of genetically improved products. Most of their own scientific organizations have confirmed what we in the United States already have accepted: Biotech food is perfectly safe to eat. Yet for complicated reasons, the Europeans find themselves receptive and vulnerable to the scaremongering of professional protesters.
Really, the ultimate biotech moratorium is a public that chooses to say no, even though that exercise is irrational.
Even so, the WTO ruling was vital--a necessary precondition to success in the future. I’m convinced that as biotech products take on consumer-friendly traits, grocery shoppers will begin to demand them, much in the way producers have demanded biotech products with producer-friendly traits. But they can’t demand heart-healthy soybean products if they don’t even know about them. The EU moratorium definitely would have kept people in the dark.
The ruling will matter in another way as well: It will encourage European farmers to redouble their calls for better access to products that many of them want but cannot obtain.
Indeed, among European farmers the demand for biotech crops is growing. A recent analysis by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) reports that five European nations planted GM crops in 2005: Spain, Germany, Portugal, France, and the Czech Republic. Only one of these countries--the Czech Republic--was a newcomer to the biotech club, but neither Portugal nor France had planted biotech crops for several years. So this is genuine progress. All five nations grew modest amounts of Bt corn--less than the total amount we grow in Iowa, but a welcome start nonetheless.
Europe’s adoption of biotechnology has been aggravatingly slow, but at least the continent appears to be moving in the right direction. The WTO ruling ought to keep things headed that way.
Perhaps the Europeans will respond in the near-term by approving more biotech imports. Although the WTO ruling focused on a moratorium that formally ended in 2004, the EU has allowed only four new biotech imports since then: The result isn’t technically a moratorium, but maybe we could call it a less-a-torium, because the EU’s pace of regulatory approval is less than what it should be.
The WTO decision also carries symbolic importance, because it affirms our biotech future--and that’s a message that developing nations, especially in Africa, need to hear. Right now, they’re participating in the Gene Revolution about as much as they’re participating in the Torino games. The sooner they reverse course, the better--and the WTO may help do some convincing.
But the real key to future success will be to keep on going for the gold, at the WTO, on the farms of Europe, in the capitals of Africa--and most especially in the hearts and minds of consumers everywhere.
Dean Kleckner is an Iowa farmer and past president of the American Farm Bureau. He chairs Truth About Trade and Technology (www.truthabouttrade.org) a national non-profit based in Des Moines, IA, formed and led by farmers in support of freer trade and advancements in biotechnology.
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If the Winter Olympics were to award medals for anti-biotech hysteria, the Europeans probably would sweep the gold, silver, and bronze. And they wouldn’t even need help from the French judge.
