Press release - 24 June, 2003
The international environmental organisation Greenpeace today released a report accusing the US government of using the WTO as a weapon to bully developing countries into accepting genetically engineered (GE) crops and food. According to Greenpeace, the US is engaged in a "global war on biosafety and the South" in the interests of a desperate GE industry
"The US government's renewed aggression against GMO restrictions
is part of the drive to impose its own sub-standards on the rest of
the world. The ultimate aim is to enable a corporate takeover of
the global food chain from plough-to-plate, putting the
environment, biodiversity and food security at risk," said Dan
Hindsgaul from Greenpeace.
The report asserts that when the US government filed a WTO
complaint on May 13 this year against the European Union's de facto
ban on approving new GE crops, the real intention was to prevent
and roll back restrictions on genetically modified organisms (GMOs)
in both the EU and the rest of the world. This is reinforced by the
fact that the US government has succeeded in bullying developing
countries such as Sri Lanka, Bolivia, South Korea and Thailand to
ease or abandon GMO restrictions simply by threatening them with
possible WTO action.
"The WTO should have nothing to do with the regulation of GMOs.
With the entry into force of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety in
September, countries party to this UN treaty will finally have a
tool to defend themselves against the US attack on the environment,
farmers and consumers," added Hindsgaul.
Not even being a party to the Convention of Biodiversity under
which the Protocol on Biosafety was adopted, the US nevertheless
managed to stall the negotiations for eight years. The timing of
the US-led WTO case against the EU moratorium was clearly timed to
preempt the final ratification of the Protocol, which happened when
Palau ratified as the 50th nation on June 13.
"The US is a rogue state in relation to biosafety and is
actively working to break to global consensus on using the
precautionary principle when regulating GMOs. Two thirds of the
countries that have ratified the Biosafety Protocol are developing
countries, and they are incresingly seeing through the empty
promisses from the US and the GE industry that GMOs will save the
world from hunger. The fact of the matter is that there is no GE
crops out there helping poor farmers in the South or alleviating
hunger. Only the GE industry stands to gain from removing or easing
GMO restrictions," said Gerard Greenfield from Greenpeace.
With the 5th WTO Ministerial taking place in Mexico, and
coinciding with the coming into force of the Biosafety Protocol,
there is a critical opportunity for governments in the South to
speak out against the threat posed by GE crops. The contamination
of Mexican corn with US GE corn is the first case of contamination
in a center of diversity. These are precisely the adverse effects
of GMOs on the conservation and sustainable use of biological
diversity that the Protocol is designed to prevent. The case of GE
maize contamination in Mexico must be seen as absolute proof that
biosafety must be enforced over and above free trade rules, and has
the potential to become the defining battle in ending the US global
war on farmers, consumers and the environment.