GOVERNMENTS last weekend won the right under international law to ban imports
of genetically modified organisms. Or so they hope. But concessions won by major
grain-exporting nations such as the US in the final hours of negotiations in
Montreal may create a scientific and legal minefield.
At 5 am last Saturday, 130 nations agreed on the Biosafety Protocol, the
first major treaty to control international trade in GMOs. The treaty allows
countries to halt imports of GMOs that they fear 鈥渕ay have an adverse effect鈥� on
biological diversity or human health. It covers food, animal feed and seeds, but
not pharmaceuticals.
Until now, the World Trade Organization has required safety bans to be backed
by 鈥渟ufficient scientific evidence鈥�. But to environmentalists鈥� delight, the
meeting adopted the 鈥減recautionary principle鈥�, allowing countries can react to
scientific uncertainty with a ban.
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Until the very last moment the 鈥淢iami Group鈥� of major grain exporting
nations鈥攖he US, Canada, Argentina, Australia, Uruguay and
Chile鈥攃ondemned this as back-door trade protectionism. But they finally
gave in. 鈥淲e live in a world in which scientific certainty is not available,鈥�
admitted the US chief negotiator, under-secretary Frank Loy.
Under the agreement, countries must monitor GMOs through their life cycle
before releasing them into the environment and must cooperate on research into
their potential impacts.
Despite the euphoria at the agreement, which took five years to negotiate,
there are still large areas of uncertainty. The talks failed to agree on the
labelling of products containing GMOs. A holding clause says shipments should
carry a label saying they 鈥渕ay contain鈥� GMOs.
Detailed labelling rules鈥攐n, for instance, which GMOs a particluar
shipment contains, and their potential effects鈥攚ill be decided in a few
years. This raises questions about how governments will decide on the risks the
products might pose in the meantime.
Farmers and traders won鈥檛 have to segregate products containing GMOs. The US
argued that segregation would cost billions of dollars because GM varieties make
up half of the nation鈥檚 soybean and a third of its maize crops. But observers
from organisations as diverse as Greenpeace and the Swiss-based seed company
Novartis agree that the demands of consumers and retailers are already nudging
grain traders towards segregation.
A dispute between the US and the European Union over whether the protocol
should take precedence over the free trade rules of the World Trade Organization
was finally fudged. Margot Wallstr枚m, the EU environment commissioner, says
the WTO will rule in any dispute over an import ban, but will have to take the
protocol into account when doing so.