WTO
rules put free-trade of agribusiness above national health concerns
By F. William Engdahl, March 29, 2006
In February, a private organization with
unique powers over world industry, trade and agriculture, issued a Preliminary
Draft Ruling on a three-year-old case. The case was brought by the Bush
Administration in May 2003 against European Union rules hindering the spread of
genetically-engineered plants and foods. The WTO ruling, which is to be final
in December, will have more influence over life and death on this planet than
most imagine.
The ruling was issued by a special
three-man tribunal of the World Trade Organization, in Geneva Switzerland. The
WTO decision will open the floodgates to the forced introduction of
genetically-manipulated plants and food products-- GMO, or genetically-modified
organisms as they are technically known-- into the world’s most important
agriculture production region, the European Union.
The WTO case arose from a formal complaint
filed by the governments of the United States, Canada and Argentina—three of
the world’s most GMO-polluted areas.
The WTO three-judge panel, chaired by
Christian Haberli, a mid-level Swiss Agriculture Office bureaucrat, ruled that
the EU had applied a 'de facto' moratorium on approvals of GMO products between
June 1999 and August 2003, contradicting Brussels' claim that no such
moratorium existed. The WTO judges argued the EU was ‘guilty’ of not following
EU rules, causing ‘undue delay’ in following WTO obligations.
The secretive WTO tribunal also ruled,
according to the leaked document, that in terms of product-specific measures,
the completion of formal EU government approval to plant specific GMO plants
had also been unduly delayed in the cases of 24 of 27 specific GMO products
that the European Commission in Brussels had before it.
The WTO tribunal recommended that the WTO Dispute Settlement Body (DSB), the world trade policeman, call on the EU to bring its practices ‘into conformity with its obligations under the (WTO’s) SPS Agreement.’ Failure to comply with WTO demands can result in hundreds of millions dollars in annual fines.
Trade über Alles
SPS stands for Sanitary and Phytosanitary
Measures. On the surface it sounds as if health concerns were part of the WTO
considerations. The reality is the opposite. Only minimal health standards are
to be allowed to be enforced under WTO free trade rules, and any nation
attempting anything more strict, such as the EU ban on import of US hormone-fed
beef, can be found guilty by WTO of an ‘unfair restraint of trade.’
Today the EU must pay a fine of $150
million yearly to maintain its ban on the US hormone-fed beef. WTO rules in
effect put free-trade interests of agribusiness above national health concerns.
That means, de facto, that the EU Commission must complete its approval process
for the 24 outstanding applications to plant GMO crops in Europe once the final
ruling is made later this year.
That will mean a flood of new GMO products
in EU agriculture. Monsanto, Syngenta and other GMO multinationals have already
taken advantage of lax national rules in new EU member countries such as Poland
to get the GMO ‘foot-in-the door.’ Now it will be far easier for them. Pro-GMO
governments such as that of Angela Merkel in Germany can claim they are only
following WTO ‘orders.’
What is the significance of this WTO ruling, assuming it remains as is in final form by December? It represents a major, dangerous wedge into largely GMO-free EU agriculture, permitting powerful agribusiness multinationals such as Monsanto, Dow Chemicals or DuPont to overrun national or regional efforts to halt the march of GMO. For this reason, it is potentially the most damaging decision in the history of world trade agreements.
A strategic Washington matter
The case first came before the World Trade
Organization in a filing made by the Bush Administration in May 2003, just as
the military occupation of Iraq was entering a new phase. The US President held
a rare press conference to tell the world that the US was formally charging the
EU, accusing the EU ‘moratorium’ on GMO approval of being a cause of starvation
in Africa. Their twisted logic argued that so long as a major industrialized
region such as the EU resisted planting GMO crops domestically, it caused
sceptical African governments to harden their resistance to US food aid in the
form of GMO crops. That, Bush charged, was causing unnecessary ‘starvation’ in
Africa because some countries refused USDA food aid in form of GMO crop
surpluses.
The issue of breaking resistance barriers
in the European Union to the proliferation of GMO crops has been a matter of
the highest strategic priority for those controlling policy in Washington since
1992 when then-President George H.W. Bush, the father of the current President,
issued an Executive Order proclaiming GMO plants such as soybeans or GMO corn
to be ‘substantially equivalent’ to ordinary corn or soybeans, and, therefore,
not needing any special health safety study or testing.
That ‘substantial equivalence’ ruling by
President Bush in 1992 opened the floodgates to the unregulated spread of GMO
across the American agriculture landscape. As basis for its 2003 WTO filing
against the EU, Washington, on behalf of agribusiness interests including
Monsanto, Dow, DuPont and others, charged the EU with violation of the American
‘substantial equivalence’ doctrine!
So long as the world’s second most powerful agriculture trade region, the EU, firmly resisted the introduction of untested GM plants, the global spread of the GMO revolution would remain strategically crippled. For the past decades, breaking up the system of domestic agriculture protection of the EU, centered around its Common Agriculture Program, has been a strategic political and trade goal of the US Government and US-based agribusiness. The creation of the WTO in 1995, a result of the GATT Uruguay Round trade talks during the 1980’s, opened the possibility for the first time of forcing the EU to drop its defenses on US threat of sanctions.
The secret process behind WTO
When the final WTO Panel ruling is
published and official this coming December, assuming no major changes take
place in the 1,050 page preliminary ruling of February 7, a major barrier to
the global spread of largely untested and highly unstable genetically modified
foods will be gone. This will become unstoppable, as it was in the USA, unless
political pressure from a sceptical European population forces the EU
Commission to pay a WTO fine or penalty, in lieu of acceding to the demands of
the WTO.
It’s relevant to ask what is this body, WTO
which exercises such enormous power over laws of nations? What is its mandate
and who controls its policies?
The negotiations of world trade since the
establishment of the Bretton Woods postwar monetary system at the end of World
War II, had been made through a General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT),
a series of trade rounds on specific issues between specific member countries. In
September 1986, on US-led pressure, the Uruguay Round of GATT was launched in
Punta del Este Uruguay. The result was creation of a new, powerful private
international agency, the WTO.
In late 1994 the US Congress voted to join
the WTO, the new permanent trade body established by the GATT Uruguay Round. There
was almost no debate. It was clear in Washington who would dominate the new
body. Unlike GATT which had no enforcement power, and which required unanimous
member vote for sanctions, the WTO would be given tough sanction and
enforcement powers. More important, how it reached decisions was to remain
secret, with no democratic oversight. The most vital issues of economic life on
the planet were to be decided behind closed doors in Geneva WTO headquarters or
in Washington and Brussels. It could choose its ‘experts’ as it saw fit and
ignore what evidence it saw fit. In the EU GMO dispute, three of four initial
scientific experts chosen were from either US or UK institutions, two countries
most in favour of GMO. (1)
Two years earlier, in 1992, at the UN
Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Rio, 175 UN governments signed a
convention to on the safe handling and treatment of GMOs, a major vote of the
world community to examine the health and economic impacts of GMO agriculture
before it could be allowed in a country. The US Government of President George
Bush Sr. aggressively opposed the CBD, arguing that a Biosafety Protocol was
unnecessary. Under the CBD agreement, a country could prohibit GMO imports.
The GMO industry, led by Monsanto, DuPont
and Dow of the US, sabotaged this agreement. A group of six countries
controlling the world Biotech or GMO market—Canada, Argentina, Uruguay,
Australia Chile and USA-- forced a clause into the CBD text which would
subordinate the Biosafety Protocol to the WTO. They argued that limiting trade
based on ‘unproven’ biosafety concerns should be considered a ‘barrier to
trade’ under WTO rules!
Traditional liability law holds that a new
product must first be proven safe before being allowed on market. This WTO rule
placing the burden of proof not on the producer of a new GMO product, but on
the potential victims, turned prudence and health safety issues on its head. In
the end the US destroyed the Biosafety Protocol by refusing to include soybeans
and corn, 99% of all GMO products, making the Protocol near worthless regarding
GMO health issues.
The WTO serves as the weapon for the
powerful coalition of Washington and the powerful private GMO giants, led by
Monsanto. Earlier in 1992, Bush, on advice of Monsanto and the emerging US GM
giant companies, ruled that GM organisms were ‘substantially equivalent’ to
ordinary seeds for soybeans or corn and such. As ‘substantially equivalent,’ GM
seeds required no special testing or health controls before being put on the
market. This was crucial to the future of Monsanto and the GMO lobby.
By Presidential Executive Order, the US had
defined GMO seeds as harmless and hence not needing to be regulated for health
and safety. It made sure this principle was carried over into the new WTO in
the form of the WTO’s Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement (SPS), which stated,
‘Food standards and measures aimed at protecting people from pests or animals
can potentially be used as a deliberate barrier to trade.’ The US charge
against the EU in the present GMO dispute charged the EU with violation of the
SPS agreement of WTO.
Other WTO rules in the Agreement to
Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) forbid member countries from using domestic
standards or testing, food safety laws, product standards, calling them an
‘unfair barrier to trade.’
The impact of those two US-mandated WTO
rulings meant that Washington could threaten that any government restricting
import of GM plants on grounds they might pose threats to health and safety of
their population, could be found to be in violation of WTO free trade rules!
This is what the US Government, on behalf
of its agribusiness private corporations has done against the EU restrictions
on GMO.
Under the WTO’s Technical Barriers to Trade, the US has argued that no labelling of GMO plants was required, as the plants have not been ‘substantially transformed’ from normal or non-GM soya, corn or other plants. This conveniently ignored the fact that Washington simultaneously insisted that GMOs, due to the genetic engineering process, are sufficiently transformed, i.e. NOT equivalent, to be patented as ‘original’, and protected under WTO TRIPS intellectual property patent rights. (2).
The Agreement on Agriculture
The heart of the WTO machinery is the WTO
Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), which under the sheep’s wool of ‘free trade,’
hides the wolf of private agri-business GMO monopoly power. Under AoA rules,
since 1995 poorer developing countries have been forced to eliminate quotas and
slash protective tariffs, at the same time the Bush Administration voted to
increase its subsidies to US agribusiness farming by $80 billions.
The net effect has been to allow the
powerful monopoly of five grain trading giants—Cargill, ADM, Bunge, Andre
(formerly) and Louis Dreyfus—to dramatically increase the dumping of food
commodities globally, ruining millions of family farmers worldwide in the
process, while maximizing their private corporate profits.
The AoA of WTO ignores the reality of
agriculture markets which are qualitatively different from, say, the market for
cars or CD’s. Agriculture and national food safety and security are at the
heart of a nation’s sovereignty, and its obligation to its own citizens to support
the basics of life. Agriculture is unique in this respect, along with water
rights.
The AoA was written by the US-dominated agribusiness giants such as Cargill, ADM, Monsanto and DuPont, to serve the agenda of these global supranational private companies, whose sole aim is to maximize profits and market monopoly, regardless of human consequences. Their focus is the domination of the $1 trillion global agriculture trade. The actual author of the AoA of WTO was Daniel Amstutz, a former Vice President of Cargill Grain, who was at the time in the Washington US Trade Representative’s Office, before going back to the grain trade.(3).
Who controls WTO?
The essential control of WTO decisions,
decisions which have the full power of international law and can force
governments to repeal local laws for health, safety and such is held by private
interests, by a global US-centered agribusiness cartel. There are no public or
democratic checks on the power of WTO.
On paper, WTO rules are made by a consensus
of all 134 member countries. In reality, four countries, led by the United
States, decide all important agriculture and other trade issues. As in the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank, Washington exercises decisive
control behind the scenes. And it does so in the interest of the private
agribusiness cartel.
The four WTO controlling countries, known
as the QUAD countries, are USA, Canada, Japan and the EU. In the QUAD, in turn,
the giant agri-business multinationals exercise controlling influence, most clearly
in Washington.
The WTO is designed to impose the wishes of
giant private companies over the legitimate democratic will of entire nations
and duly-elected governments. WTO has one mission: enforce rules of a ‘free
trade,’ an agenda which is in no way genuinely ‘free’ but rather suits the
needs of agribusiness giants.
Under the secretive WTO rules, countries
can challenge another’s laws for restricting their trade. The case is then
heard by a tribunal or court of three trade bureaucrats. They are usually
influential corporate lawyers with pro-free trade bias. The lawyers have no
conflict of interest rules binding them, such that a Monsanto lawyer can rule
on a case of material interest to Monsanto.
Further, there is no rule that the judges
of WTO respect any national laws of any country. The three judges meet in
secret without revealing the time or location. All court documents are
confidential and are not published unless one party releases it. It is a modern
version of the Spanish Inquisition, but with far more power.
The EU banned the import of US beef treated
with growth and other hormones, and the US lodged a formal WTO complaint. There
was a long report from independent scientists showing that the hormones added
to US beef were ‘cancer-causing’. The WTO three judge panel ruled that the EU
did not present a ‘valid’ scientific case to refuse import, and the EU was
forced to pay $150 million annually for lost US profits. (4).
The powerful private interests who control
WTO agriculture policy prefer to remain in the background as little-publicized
NGO’s. One of the most influential in creating the WTO is a little-publicized
organization called the IPC-- the International Food and Agricultural Trade
Policy Council, shortened to International Policy Council.
The IPC was created in 1987 to lobby for
the GATT agriculture rules of WTO at the Uruguay GATT talks. The IPC demanded
removal of ‘high tariff’ barriers in developing countries, remaining silent on
the massive government subsidy to agribusiness in the USA.
A look at the IPC membership explains what
interests it represents. The IPC Chairman is Robert Thompson, former Assistant
Secretary US Department of Agriculture and former Presidential economic
adviser. Also included in the IPC are Bernard Auxenfans, Chief Operating Officer,
Monsanto Global Agricultural Company and Past Chairman of Monsanto Europe S.A.;
Allen Andreas of ADM/Toepfer; Andrew Burke of Bunge (US); Dale Hathaway former
USDA official and head IFPRI (US).
Other IPC members include Heinz Imhof,
chairman of Syngenta (CH); Rob Johnson of Cargill and USDA Agriculture Policy
Advisory Council; Franz Fischler Former Commissioner for Agriculture, European
Commission; Guy Legras (France) former EU Director General Agriculture; Donald
Nelson of Kraft Foods (US); Joe O’Mara of USDA, Hiroshi Shiraiwa of Mitsui
& Co Japan; Jim Starkey former Assistant US Trade Representative; Hans
Joehr, Nestle’s head of agriculture; Jerry Steiner of Monsanto (US). Members
Emeritus include Ann Veneman, former Bush Administration Secretary of
Agriculture and former board member of Calgene, creator of the Flavr Savr
genetically-modified tomato.
The IPC is controlled by US-based agribusiness giants which benefit from the rules they drafted for WTO trade. In Washington itself, the USDA no longer represents interests of small family farmers. It is the lobby of giant global agribusiness. The USDA is a revolving door for these private agribusiness giants to shape friendly policies. GMO policy is the most blatant example.
Brussels also dominated by GMO lobby
The power of the giant GMO companies and
US-centered agribusiness companies extends to control of key policies in
Brussels at the European Commission. Typical is the fact that former EU
Agricuolture Commissioner Franz Fischler is a member of the powerful pro-GMO
IPC.
For years it has been common knowledge
among EU farm experts that grain policy was not set by national governments but
by the Big Five private grain traders led by Cargill and ADM. Now the powerful
weight of Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta and the GMO lobby has been added. This is
clear in the recent announcement of a new EU program, SAFEFOODS, a successor to
the controversial pro-GMO ENTRANSFOOD project. ENTRANSFOOD was set up to
‘facilitate market introduction of GMO’s in Europe, and therefore to bring the
European (sic) industry into a competitive position.’
ENTRANSFOOD, now called the more innocuous
SAFEFOODS, claims to combine different views on GMO food. In reality, its key
Working Group 1, responsible for ‘Safety Testing of Transgenic Foods’ consists
of representatives not from independent consumer organizations, but from
Monsanto, Unilever, Bayer Corp., Syngenta and BIBRA International, a
consultancy close to agribusiness and the pharmaceutical industry.
As well, Dr. Harry Kuiper, a Dutch
scientist member of the food safety GMO group of SAFEFOODS in Brussels, is
Coordinator of SAFEFOODS. Kuiper chairs the EU European Food Safety Authority
GMO Panel. He also has also been leading the vicious slander attack campaign to
discredit genetic scientist Dr Arpad Pusztai who dared to go public with
alarming evidence of organ damage from rats fed GMO potatoes and was fired on
the intervention of Monsanto in 1999.(5).
The WTO today is nothing more than the
global policeman for the powerful GMO lobby and the agribusiness firms tied to
it.
With the new German coalition government under Chancellor Angela Merkel and Agriculture Minister Horst Seehofer now officially on record supporting the role of Germany as a future leader in biotech crops and GMO, the impact of the latest WTO ruling on food safety in the EU and beyond has put European and hence, world food safety world in danger.
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Footnotes:
1.Abreu, Marcelo de Paiva, “Brazil, the GATT and the WTO: History and
Prospects”, September 1998, Department of Economics, PUC, Rio de Janeiro, No.
392.
2. GMOs and the WTO: Overruling the Right to say No,’ By World
Development Movement, November 1999, www.wdm.org.uk .
3. Murphy, Sophia, ‘WTO Agreement on Agriculture: Suitable Model for a
Global Food System?’ Foreign Policy in Focus, v.7, no. 8, June 2002.
4. Montague, Peter, UAW Local 1981/AFL-CIO, The WTO and Free Trade,
Environmental Research Foundation in www.garynull.com .
5. PR Operation on GM Foods again exposes EFSA industry-bias,” Press release, 29.12.2004. www.gmwatch.org.