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Thailand

Bans new field trials; approves Roundup Ready soybeans.

European Union

Requires member states to ensure the traceability of genetically modified foods at all stages of marketing; restricts new product approvals to 10 years with renewal for another 10 years; establishes public registers for field-testing sites; phases out use of certain antibiotic-resistance markers; establishes labeling threshold of 1%. France, Italy, Luxembourg, Austria, Denmark and Greece declare moratorium on planting until these rules take effect.

SOURCE: Food Chemical News, 2001.

The inconsistent decisions of international bodies in dealing with genetically modified foods do little to engender trust that the system will operate in the public interest. In 1999, for example, the Biosafety Protocol, an international committee formed as a result of the 1992 biodiversity treaty forged in Rio de Janeiro, proposed to require shipments of transgenic foods to be approved in advance by importing countries. The United States refused to sign the treaty, which was also opposed by other large food-exporting nations such as Canada, Australia, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. The reason: the requirement could institute “a draconian regime that we have never seen before except for highly toxic and hazardous substances.”42 In January 2000, delegates from 130 nations adopted the treaty, but with compromises; they permitted genetically modified foods to be exported without advance notice but allowed countries to decide for themselves whether transgenic foods, seeds, and microbes posed a threat to the environment. If countries decided to prohibit imports on that basis, they could. Industry leaders considered the compromise as a win and hoped that the treaty would help counter the perception that food biotechnology was not adequately regulated. Some European countries viewed such trade agreements as barely masked attempts to achieve political goals. Many Europeans resented U.S. trade restrictions against countries that conduct business with Iran, Libya, or Cuba, and perceived the aggressive marketing of American transgenic crops as arrogant, controlling, and insensitive. They thought the phrase, “what’s good for G.M. is good for America,” now meant that genetic modification had replaced General Motors as the symbol of United States corporate power.43

Europeans particularly resented the lack of labeling, as it left them little choice at the marketplace. If labels were required, however, U.S. companies would have to take several complicated and expensive actions: segregate conventional crops from transgenic crops in fields as well as during storage, transport, and processing; document the traceability of the crops; and establish thresholds for levels of transgenic contamination. U.S. food producers oppose these measures as impractical and expensive, and international authorities have yet to agree on the lowest level of contaminating transgenes that will permit crops to be labeled “GM-free.”

The views of different countries on such issues are “harmonized” by the WTO, but also to a lesser extent by the Codex Alimentarius (food code) Commission of the United Nations. In 1994, an international consumers’ group petitioned the Codex to develop standards for mandatory labeling of transgenic foods because “the burden of labeling should fall on those who wish to use and profit from biotechnology and not on those who choose not to use it”; the group renewed such requests through the 1990s. By 1999, public opinion in Europe, especially in Great Britain, overwhelmingly favored labeling and segregation of conventional crops from transgenic crops. When the European Union asked the Codex Commission to require labels for all foods containing identifiable transgenic ingredients, only the United States and Argentina (which also exports transgenic crops) opposed this proposal.44 U.S. Codex representatives argue that the true purpose of calls for labeling is to protect European trade restrictions: “a mandatory process-based label on genetically engineered food has the potential