The Way Ahead: Alternatives

Two principal alternatives toward international harmonization of GMO policy exist. Both arise from the pressure of national or EU decisions whose effects have prompted efforts to coordinate and negotiate. Discussions of these occur within the WTO and other international fora, including transgovernmental networks (Hopkins, 1976; Slaughter, 2000). A harmonization of GM regulation is possible, perhaps analogous to ones found in other regulatory regimes that have been developed in the last few decades – nuclear power, pharmaceuticals, climate and electronics (Cerny, 2001; Biermann, 2002).

First alternative

The first alternative, driven by commercial and trade interests, centres on the outcome of a US–EU contest. Regime norm setting would result from unilateral measures of the two dominant players and WTO rulings. The underlying principles will be trade norms in which arguments over ‘safety’ concerns would be interpreted in terms of whether they constituted allowable or illegal barriers to trade. This is the most likely alternative, given recent trends. The worldwide hesitation to proceed with GM food or feed crops in countries as diverse as Brazil and China reflects a growing commercial anxiety about loss of access to big import markets such as the EU, Korea, and Japan.

A harmonization of GM trade rules around EU standards could effectively halt or even reverse the spread of GM cropproduction in any country aspiring to sell food or feed commodities internationally. The EU’s proposed L&T Regulation makes clear that products entering the Community from countries that plant GM will have to be segregated and identity preserved according to the Regulation, and imports from non-GM countries will have to be sampled and tested to certify the absence of GM content (Commission of the European Communities, 2001). Wealthy exporting countries such as the USA that now plant GM may eventually decide not to plant GM if this kind of import regulation becomes the international norm. It will be economically cheaper for the USA to stop planting GM altogether, allowing domestic farmproduction costs to increase slightly, rather than ask the entire food and farm sector to pay the burdensome segregation costs and accept the legal liabilities that will be associated with an L&T system. This is particularly true since embracing an L&T system will be no guarantee that export sales of GM products will continue to be made. EU import inspectors will not stop GM foods from entering the Community so long as they are segregated, identity preserved, and labelled, but many private importers will probably opt not to buy them once a GM label is attached. So if the EU standard is embraced as a universal trade standard, the safe and prudent option for exporting countries such as the United States will be to stop planting GM crops – in effect, following the practice of farmers in the EU.

Are there some prospects for compromise or adjustment is such a dyadic struggle? Several options, suggested by some observers of WTO and global governance issues, outline possible paths for harmonization; yet each of these is flawed in the current circumstances. While all players agree that avoiding a major disruption of trans-Atlantic GMO food and feed trade will require some form of self-conscious regulatory cooperation between the USA and the EU, actually achieving this has proved illusive.

In the abstract, this needed cooperation might take one of three different forms: mutual recognition of regulatory systems, explicit regulatory harmonization, or informal mutual regulatory adjustment. The mutual recognition approach requires a formal international agreement in advance not to place restrictions on product trade despite differing internal product regulations. This highly decentralized, pro-trade approach to regulatory cooperation can work for well-established and familiar products, particularly those traded among similar countries enjoying high levels of political trust. For example, within the EU itself a mutual recognition agreement allows wine produced in any EU country to be sold in all 15, even where production standards differ between countries. For GMO trade across the Atlantic, however, this mutual recognition approach has little promise. Within Europe GMOs are not a familiar and trusted product, and the US approach to GMO regulation – because it does not embrace the precautionary principle – is politically unacceptable.

A second possible approach to regulatory cooperation would be explicit regulatory harmonization . This would require agreement on a single international standard for the approval of GMOs, and agreement on a single standard for the labelling of food and feed products containing or derived from GMOs. We have seen the limits of this approach as well. Agreement on a single international standard is unlikely on GMOs, given the entrenched differences not only between the USA and the EU, but also between the WTO and the CBP. And we have seen that the Codex, because of increasing internal politicization, has so far failed to bridge these differences.