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The Green Guide

So-Called "Free Trade" & WTO Means Force-feeding Consumers
Dangerous and Unwanted Food

Law: Why are we being force-fed? America's victory in the banana war shows
free trade has lost us legal control over our food and health, writes James
Erlichman
The Guardian (UK) April 13, 1999

Last week it was bananas. In a month's time it will be beef. A
few weeks after that we may be told what milk we can buy.
The legal struggle over who controls our food supply has
already been lost.

When the World Trade Organisation ruled last week that the United States
had won its protracted
banana trade battle with the EU, attention understandably focused on the
plight of small
ex-colonial producer, the Winward Islands, which Britain had sought to
protect. Next came
concern for Scottish cashmere and Italian cheese producers who are
threatened by the pounds 120
million worth of punitive tariffs which the WTO has awarded to the US to
compensate it for the
lost earnings of its big banana plantation companies.

But, according to legal experts, we should be looking to the future to
grasp just how
comprehensively control over food, health and the environment has been
ceded to the WTO and
the unelected forces that control it. `Legal power in these and other
areas shifted back in the early
1990s with few ordinary people actually noticing,' says Geert Van Calster,
a member of the
Brussels Bar and a consultant to SJ Berwin & Co, the London-based law firm
which specialises
in international trade.

The WTO was born four years ago out of the Uruguay round of the old GATT
(General
Agreement on Trade and Tariffs) negotiations. According to Van Calster,
Britain and most other
countries signed up to the agreement at a time when belief in the virtues
of free trade exceeded
concerns about food safety, health, animal welfare and environmental damage.

And if the WTO has powers to grant the United States pounds 120 million in
damages over
bananas, then imagine the scope of its power on bigger issues, such as the
trade in genetically
modified food.

In June, the World Trade Organisation's so-called expert food panel (known
as Codex
Alimentarius) is expected to rule that the genetically engineered
milk-yield booster, BST, poses
no threat to human health. Never mind that two scientific committees of
the European
Commission have raised grave doubts about its safety and want to see the
EU moratorium kept
in place. [ Monsanto ] , the US company which owns BST, will now have a
powerful legal lever to
overturn any objections from EU governments and citizens.

Even before that, a certain collision is expected on May 13. That is when
the WTO has told the
European Union that it must lift its 10-year blockade on American beef
that has been treated with
growth- boosting hormones.

In theory, the WTO's complex rules balance the virtues of free trade
against the need to protect
people and the planet. `The problem is that in practice they don't,' says
lawyer Peter Stevenson,
legal director of the pressure-group Compassion in World Farming. The nub
of the issue, he
says, is the founding principle of GATT and the WTO: the belief that free
trade will reduce the
risk of war and make the world wealthy through international capitalism, a
principle enshrined in
rules which forbid trade discrimination on the basis of any `process and
production methods'.
This rule stops a lazy, outmoded producer from blocking imports from an
efficient country
which has invested in the latest machinery. That seems fine. `But it would
also stop a country
which has adopted only free-range methods from blocking imports of
battery-farmed eggs,' says
Stevenson.

Article 20 of the GATT agreement allows a country to ban imports on the
grounds that `public
morals or animal health' are threatened. But only if such a ban is
absolutely `necessary'.
`Necessary' does not mean necessary to protect people and animals. It
means `necessary' in the
sense that all other legal avenues have been explored and exhausted.

Even the US has fallen foul of this, trying to block the import of tuna
and shrimp when nets also
snared dolphin and sea turtles. Both times it was overruled by the WTO
disputes procedure on
the grounds that other legal avenues were not exhausted, and that existing
conservation treaties
did not necessarily include the species in question. `If a measure
designed to save a species from
extinction cannot survive a WTO challenge, it's hard to believe any animal
protection measure
will ever be acceptable to the WTO,' says Stevenson.

A few years ago, Tim Lang, now professor of food policy at Thames Valley
University, led an
investigation into decision-making on food at the WTO. It revealed that
the Codex Alimentarius
is heavily influenced by the delegates from transnational corporations who
pack its
decision-making panels.

`If and when the EU moves to ban GM soya or any other genetically
engineered food you can be
virtually certain that American companies will swiftly force the US
government to challenge any
embargo under WTO rules,' said Professor Lang.

The Americans, it can be argued, are simply using international law to
look after their own
interests. But don't be too smug - Agriculture Minister Nick Brown has
just voiced his support
for American hormone-reared beef, while Blair has been remarkably keen to
defend GM foods,
despite fierce public opposition. `The reason is simple,' says a source at
the Ministry of
Agriculture. `British industry may have failed at many things, but it is
first-rate in the
bio-sciences - drugs and GM foods. We have to back our commercial winners,
and we will use
the World Trade Organisation, just like the Americans do, to profit from
its rulings.'

(Copyright 1999)