Defending a Vanishing Moratorium: GMOs and the WTO

International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF)
www.iuf.org
10/30/04

Presentation by IUF to the seminar "A Trans-Atlantic GMO Trade War: US
attempts to use the WTO Against European citizens" organized by Friends
of the Earth Europe on behalf of the Bite Back: Hands off our Food
campaign and The Five Year Freeze campaign on behalf of the
International Public Interest Amicus Coalition at the European Social
Forum, London, October 15, 2004.

Good afternoon, my name is Peter Rossman. I am the Communications
Director for the IUF, an international trade union federation
representing workers' trade unions along the food chain. We represent
some 12 million workers in agriculture and plantations, food
processing, and hotels and restaurants organized in 351 trade unions in
124 countries. We are very pleased to be here and I want to warmly
thank the organizers of this event.

Why are we here? GMOs are clearly an issue for the labour movement and
for the IUF because they are about rights, power and control. The
evidence on the impact of GMOs on human health may be ambiguous, though
in our view it is sufficient to warrant banning them on the basis of
the precautionary principle. But there is absolutely no doubt that they
represent a social threat of the highest magnitude. GMOs are a tool,
probably the most powerful one yet invented, for consolidating the grip
of the transnational agrifood corporations on the global food chain,
and that alone is sufficient reason to oppose them. They are a
corporate attack on the environment and biodiversity, an attack on food
security and food sovereignty, an attack on the rights of workers and
consumers. Keeping GMOs out of the food chain is in our view a matter
of fundamental social self-defense.

Given the nature of this meeting I don't think I have to make the
general case against GMOs, but I think its useful to point out a couple
of things which are sometimes overlooked. We know that the vast
majority of GMO patents embody herbicide- or pesticide-resistant
traits. What is sometimes forgotten is that it is agricultural workers
who are in the front line of exposure to pesticide poisoning. The World
Health Organization estimates that every year some 40,000 people die
from pesticides (these are unintentional deaths, excluding suicides)
and a further 3-4 million are severely poisoned. We have to remember
that the pesticide residues that understandably alarm consumers are
only residues. They are what remain after the workers who apply them
and work around them after application are directly exposed to highly
toxic substances. Agricultural and plantation workers are continuously
exposed to pesticides even after spraying, because in agriculture there
is no clear-cut distinction between the living and working environment.
So radically reducing and eliminating dependency on pesticides is a
major goal for food and agricultural workers unions, for whom
sustainable agriculture is not just a good idea but a basic question of
survival and health and safety on the job. GMOs clearly take us in the
opposite direction.

In Argentina, farmworkers are now applying undiluted glyphosate and
attacking Roundup-resistant super-weeds with axes. After the harvest
the fields are sprayed with paraquat, which is one of the most toxic
herbicides on the market (and which the Commission has recently lifted
restrictions on in Europe!). This is the inevitable result of a decade
of GMO cultivation. Pioneer Hi-Bred, the world's largest seed
corporation, is currently testing a GMO maize which is six-times more
resistant to glyphosate than Monsanto's Roundup ready variety. The
plant is programmed to degrade the herbicide it absorbs, and can
sustain non-stop herbicide application. The threat to workers and to
human health and the environment is obvious.

I read the EU submission in response to the US complaint very carefully
and there is NO mention of the impact of GMOs on the health and safety
of agricultural workers with respect to pesticides or any other aspect
of production. Nor am I aware of any specific worker health and safety
evaluation in any of the national GMO reviews which have been
conducted, like the UK crop trials which were generally considered to
be the most comprehensive. Nor am I aware of any studies on the impact
of GMOs on the health and safety of workers in the various industries
which process GMO crops - milling, brewing, baking and so on. There
simply haven't been any. The effects of GMOs on those who will have to
work with them in order to bring food to the table has never been
investigated and that is one more reason for banning their
commercialization and fighting for a genuine moratorium on their use.

So what can unions bring to the campaign to get GMOs out of Europe and
keep it GMO free? Workers can and do participate as individuals in
consumer-based movements against GMOs, but through their unions they
engage directly with the companies, through the collective bargaining
process. Unions can negotiate collective bargaining agreements which
commit food processing companies to GMO-free production. This increases
pressure on the seed companies which are promoting them, the TNCs which
are processing them and on national and supranational political bodies.
In Italy, IUF member unions have begun this process. Italian agrofood
unions have incorporated GMO-free commitments into their collective
bargaining agreements with the brewer Peroni - a subsidiary of the
transnational SABMiller, with the Italian pasta and baked goods
manufacturer Barilla and with the transnational canned fruit and
vegetable and fruit juice maker Conserve Italia. These kinds of
agreements need to be extended and multiplied, and need to be backed
with increased consumer pressure on the producing companies to commit
themselves to GMO free production. This is one way we can strengthen
public opinion in support of a moratorium, split the employers on this
issue and stiffen political resistance. The companies - from
agricultural to retail - have to become a primary target for anti-GMO
campaigns, and we will try to educate and mobilize our members to play
their part. It would be very helpful if groups outside the labour
movement could be sensitive to our concerns as trade unionists and
integrate the arguments I've made here into their own public
campaigning.

Now I would like to specifically address the question of unions and the
WTO complaint. One of the pillars of the US complaint is the use it
makes of the WTO Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade, which
excludes "production processes and production methods" from trade
rules. This means that the social, health and safety, environmental and
political conditions under which goods are produced are deemed
irrelevant. Commodities with the same characteristics must be treated
as "equivalent" products under national and sub-national laws and
regulations. This applies also to labelling requirements, which can be
treated as discriminatory.

Separating the production process and the products means denying the
right to know what is in a product and how it was produced. This
exclusion is a direct challenge to the labour movement's entire history
of struggle. Unions have always fought for products to be judged
according to the conditions under which they were produced. For us, and
for a growing number of consumers, there is a fundamental difference
between, for example, a banana which is produced by union workers and
one which is produced by sweated labour working under the threat of
violence. This holds equally true for GMOs. GMO soya is not equivalent
to non-GMO soya, but that is precisely the distinction which the
complaint is trying to erase.

The problem is that the EU's former moratorium is vulnerable on
precisely these grounds. It would be consistent with the rules and
jurisprudence of the WTO if the dispute resolution panel ruled in favor
of the US. And that is precisely why we can't rely on the argument that
restricting GMOs is WTO-compatible. It is arguably not. We have to
challenge the rules of the WTO, and this is what the Commission is
unwilling and unable to do. Europe's own agrofood companies have done
very well under the existing rules - consider for example the subsidies
issue - and Europe's own biotech industry, which opposed the moratorium
and worked hard to undermine it, is eagerly waiting to cash in on new
approvals for its own GMO products. The Commission's defense against
the WTO is contradictory because it is under conflicting pressures -
from consumers, who reject GMOs, and from the US government and its own
biotech industry, who seek to impose them.

The EU submission on the US case essentially argues that there never
was a moratorium, and if there was selective refusal of particular GMO
products it was WTO compatible. This simply won't wash. The Commission
can't and won't fight for a real moratorium, and this is the
fundamental problem we have to address. Europe's own biotech industry
would like to see a decision in favor of the US, which means that we
have to fight on two fronts. The fact that the Commissioners were
prepared to vote last month in favor of seed regulations which would
have legalized GMO contamination of conventional seed stocks shows just
how weak is the political will within the EU institutions to fight for
the kind of regulations and laws we need to keep out GMOs.

Authorizations on specific GMO crops shouldn't be made by the
Commission in any event - this is actually a matter for the ministers
to decide, but they prefer to abstain from taking the necessary
decisions and let the Commission do the dirty work. We've seen a
similar process at work in North America, where both the Canadian and
the US governments have been ready and willing to lose corporate
challenges under the NATA dispute resolution procedures aimed at
getting rid of environmental legislation in particular states which the
federal governments were unwilling to defend.

So I think in summing up that two lessons emerge from this. First, that
we have to work even harder to increase the effectiveness of
nationally-based campaigns against GMOs, to ensure that the voice of
European citizens and workers who reject GMOs translates more
effectively into national and European-level political decisions which
can defeat the biotech and corporate lobby on this issue. If we can't
do this, Europe's own GMO lobby will subvert the institutions and
processes which are supposed to be defending us.

Second, we have to transform the debate on GMOs and lift it out of the
narrow confines of the WTO rules and the false issue of
WTO-compatibility. The Commission's own submission actually contains a
hint of this when it says "There is a serious question as to whether
the WTO is the appropriate international forum for resolving all the
GMO issues that the Complainants have raised in these cases." This is
really the essence of the issue. For the IUF, WTO rules which would
restrict or ban labelling requirements and limit restrictions or bans
on GMOs are in violation of international human rights instruments
which in fact require states to take such measures to defend the health
and safety of their citizens and protect the environment. The Biosafety
Protocol to the International Convention on Biodiversity, which entered
into effect last year, provides a basis in international law for
rejecting GMO imports and their release into the environment. But since
it is based on the precautionary principle, it can only be enforced
over and against the WTO. A key question for our movement now is how to
make effective use of the Protocol and other human rights instruments
to build an effective defense against the corporate aggression embodied
in the US complaint as well as to defend against Europe's own biotech
industry and their political proxies. We hope that this meeting and
what follows can help contribute to this process.