WTO and Biotech Food: Who Really Won? by Gregory Conko and Co-Authored by Dr. Henry I. Miller
The long-awaited World Trade Organization decision on biotechnology applied to agricultural products, finally released earlier this month, elicited a great deal of buzz throughout the business, financial and biotech communities. Most analyses scored it a resounding victory for the United States and its co-complainants, and a stinging defeat for European protectionism. The reality is that it is a partial and largely hollow victory. For not having achieved a more complete and meaningful success, the United States, Canada, and Argentina, which jointly filed the complaint, have only their own unscientific, excessively risk-averse regulatory policies to blame.
Details of the 1,000-plus-page decision are still largely confidential, but a leaked copy of the conclusions and recommendations section makes clear that the WTO bluntly scolds the EU for denying it had imposed a moratorium on biotech food approvals from 1998 to 2004. It is disappointing that the WTO did not condemn the clearly illegitimate European policies, but the WTO's actions were limited by the fact that the complainants did not even challenge them.
How can that be? Simple -- the United States, Canada, and Argentina didn't challenge those policies because they use the same flawed basic approach as the EU. Their regulations all discriminate against the products of gene-splicing.
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