The chilling effects of the WTO

It's hot in Cancun, but there's a chill wind blowing. As the WTO sweeps into town the poorer countries in the South are feeling the chill effects of the US government's renewed agression against GMO restrictions around the world.

When the US filed a formal complaint in the WTO against the EU's de facto moratorium on GMOs in May, it was the beginning of a 5-month countdown to Cancun, where the WTO's forced trade regime will continue to bulldoze environmental and health regulations that pose 'barriers' to expanding corporate control and profit.

This corporate-driven agenda has the WTO on a collision course with Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs), like the the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety - a legally binding global instrument that gives countries the sovereign right to use the precautionary principle to restrict or ban the import of GMOs. In fact, the Protocol comes into force on September 11, 2003, coinciding with the second day of the WTO Ministerial in Cancun.

Since the EU's de facto moratorium was going to be lifted soon anyway, it's pretty clear that the US had a different target in mind when it used the WTO as a political weapon to hit GMO restrictions. The real target is the global South - where growing rejection of GMOs, including GMO food aid, is shutting down future markets for agribusiness giants like Monsanto. By filing the case against the EU, the US was sending a message to the South: restrict GMOs and you'll face trade sanctions. Since poorer countries in the South are locked into a vicious cycle of debt and export dependency (to earn the foreign currency needed to repay debt), the threat of POSSIBLE trade sanctions under the WTO is enough to scare many governments into retracting GMO restrictions. In 2001, the US threatened countries like Sri Lanka and Bolivia to lift bans on GMOs, and forced Thailand to change its draft GMO labelling laws without even filing a case in the WTO. The threat is enough.

This constant threat of WTO sanctions means that governments are forced to put all environmental and health policies and laws under a kind of risk assessment. Anything that looks like it might be used as grounds for a WTO complaint gets watered down. So instead of assessing the risk of GMOs, governments end up assesing the risks of restricting GMOs!

The other target in the US WTO complaint against the EU is the growing global consensus on biosafety. After a decade of trying to undermine the Biosafety Protocol, the US government must face the enforcement of the Protocol from September 11 onwards. So it has stepped up its attack, using the WTO to undermine this consensus and threaten countries in the South. In fact, this global
consensus is driven by the South, with developing and least-developed countries making up two-thirds of the total number of countries that have ratified the Biosafety Protocol. This contrasts sharply with the lack of consensus in the WTO - especially on agriculture - where poorer countries are being coerced into accepting MORE global inequality.

Gerard Greenfield is a Genetic Engineering campaigner with Greenpeace International