FEATURE - Global food chain poses stiff challenge for WTO talks
Date: 14-Sep-01
Country: USA
Author: Peter Bohan
With a global reach that spurs protesters from Seattle to Genoa to cast a shadow over World Trade Organisation (WTO) efforts to launch a new round of talks this year, food has also made life harder and harder for the negotiators.
A deal to conclude the last round of world trade talks, under the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), was delayed several years until 1994 as Europe and the United States fought over agricultural issues.
But if food trade negotiators thought they had a tough time in the early 1990s, they may be in for an even rougher ride now.
In recent years, boosted by GATT, the food chain has gone global in a huge way. At the same time, the food system has grabbed a lot of headlines and jolted consumers with what they've seen.
The nightmare of "madcow" disease or BSE, which emerged in Britain in 1986, was followed by this year by an outbreak of foot and mouth disease. Mountainous pyres of animal corpses blackened English skies as the authorities sought to contain it.
Genetically modified (GMO) grains, fruits, and vegetables multiplied throughout the developed world.
In Africa and parts of Asia hunger still haunts the land.
The images have cast a spotlight on the food chain, an industrial system that would just as soon go on doing its job away from the glare. But those days may be over.
FAR FROM AGREEMENT
"Nowhere in the world, as far as I know, is the need for negotiation of agriculture disputed," WTO director-general Mike Moore said in a plea to the WTO Council in July after efforts to shape a food trade agenda failed.
"But nowhere else in the world, if not here, is that negotiation going to happen," he said.
WTO food talks have centred on long-held differences between the United States, Europe, Japan, developing nations and poor countries on farm subsidies, export subsidies, market access, the environment, labour issues, food security and food safety.
But disputes still boil down to national interest, good science versus bad science, and good faith versus bad.
"We are still far from agreement," Moore said.
Moore's predecessor Peter Sutherland warned that the WTO's credibility was at stake leading into its next ministerial meeting in Qatar in November.
"Those countries that are dragging their feet on defining the nature and objectives of the mainstream agricultural dossier in a new round must now engage seriously," Sutherland told London's Financial Times on September 4.
"The current regime is quite adequate to meet any justified public health or environmental agenda," Sutherland said.
With the debates heating up, it is worth a glance at the system behind the issues.
As an industrial system, the food chain is corporate and thus subject to the basic pressures of consumers for quality and shareholders for returns. That in itself may present a certain agenda, if not a reality check, for WTO negotiators.
FOOD CHAIN BASICS
The food system's struggles are with issues and context. The issues - food safety, the environment, market access, corporate power, government's role - are old, not new. What is new is the expanding global context of the food system.
Today, a brunch in New York might feature orange juice from Brazil, water from France, pork from Denmark, a banana from Guatemala. Ingredients are globally sourced, locally mixed, globally distributed.
When one link is shaken, the whole chain rattles.
"With growing interdependency, shifts in consumption can have major impacts on food markets throughout the world," said the U.S. Agriculture Department's Economic Research Service in a report on world food trade in June, 2001.
That is the touchstone for food corporations: consumption. The consumer is king. This makes food safety and price the top issues, with "social" issues only as relevant as consumers - or shareholders - demand.
So any WTO measures addressing food safety and price are the ones most likely to