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WTO Decision on European Biotech Crop Regulatory Approval

Over the last decade, the accumulated global biotech crop area has grown in size to an amount that is 20 times the total land area of the United Kingdom or, to put it another way, to almost half the total land area in China.

The recognized mega-producers - the leaders - of biotech crop production in the world are the United States, followed by Argentina, Brazil, Canada and China. While farmers in these countries and in other countries have consistently increased their plantings of biotech crops by double-digit growth rates every year since biotech crops were first commercialized in 1996, farmers in the leading producer countries have looked at the European Union (EU) as a walled fortress with very few and, for all intents and purposes, closed or heavily-guarded gates preventing biotech crop access to, or production in, countries in the EU.

The key to growing a currently estimated USD 44 billion-biotech crop industry to a projected USD 210 billion behemoth in the coming years is developing country approval to permit their farmers to grow biotech crops currently in use and in development. And the key to that approval may reside deep in the just-released, confidential, interim-WTO panel report on the EU's biotech crops approval process and whether that process complies with the WTO's Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Agreement.

In a 1,000 plus page decision of dense legal reasoning, a WTO panel looked at the failure of the EU, as alleged by the United States, Canada and Argentina, to make final decisions on the approval of biotech products from October 1998 to the time of the establishment of the WTO panel in August 2003; and the WTO-consistency of prohibitions imposed by certain EU member states regarding specific biotech products even after these products had been approved by the EU for European-wide marketing.

The EU has had legislation since 1990 on the regulatory approval of biotech products (commonly referred to as genetically modified organisms or GMOs) and up until about 1998 had authorized the commercial release of nine biotech crops. That changed in the late 1990s when Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Italy and Luxembourg banned imports of biotech crops into, and the marketing of the products in, these countries even though the EU had given previous regulatory approval for such products. When coupled with allegations by the complaining countries that the EU regulatory authorities have been effectively "sitting on" applications for regulatory approval of 27 new biotech crops, it is not difficult to appreciate the complexity of the dispute and why it has taken almost three years for a panel to issue its interim ruling. Understandable, too, are the enormous political pressures impinging on this dispute.

The long term implications of the interim panel report are difficult to assess simply because so much depends on how the EU, its member states and other countries, including developing countries that are considering increasing acreage planted with biotech crops, react to the decision. If vigorously pursued, the decision clears the path to significantly increased biotech crop development and commerce for a number of reasons.

First, the decision authorizes and empowers the EU to get the identified member states to lift their bans on the pre-marketing approval of biotech product introductions into their markets. Second, the decision sends a message to the EU that it is under a clear obligation to use the regulatory tools at its disposal to process biotech product applications in a timely way based on a scientific rules-based review system. Third, the decision sends a message to developing countries that have been holding back on increasing acres planted with biotech products out of concern that crop yields will be shut out of lucrative European markets, that Europe can be a robust market for their product.

 

(www.truthabouttrade.org)

 
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