International politics

Throughout Europe, public opinion is against GM crops and foods, yet the WTO ignores those concerns in favour of free trade

While the UK is likely to remain free of GM crops until 2009 at the earliest, other countries are only too keen to give genetic pollution a passport to contaminate the environment. The United States, Argentina, Canada are the main growers and exporters but developing nations such as China, Brazil, India and Thailand are also becoming increasingly involved in the global GM market.

The main GM crops being grown are maize soya, some of which still enters the UK as animal feed, and cotton. In terms of crops for human consumption, the EU has effectively been closed to imports of GM foods due to a piece of legislation requiring all products are clearly labelled if they contain GM ingredients.

With consumer opinion in the EU still dead set against GM food, trying to sell the stuff would be commercial suicide. However, GM crops such as soya still enter the EU and the UK as animal feed, and the labelling regulations do not apply to meat and dairy products from animals raised on GM feed. Even though consumers had given a thumbs down to GM foods, we revealed how supermarkets like Sainsbury's were still selling milk from cattle fed on GM soya and maize.

But if we've all said no to GM food, who is trying to force it onto our plates? One of the main culprits is the US government, firmly in favour of a world swamped with GM food. It challenged the EU's anti-GM stance through the World Trade Organisation (WTO), a body whose sole purpose is to ensure a never-ending worldwide increase in trade and productivity, regardless of the social or environmental consequences.

The biotech companies that the US supports see the choice to know whether we are eating GM foods as a threat to their industry, and rightly so. But even though the WTO's ruling in 2006 stated that the EU had broken trade laws, it failed to give the US the leverage it needed to force GM foods into Europe as it determined that individual states were able to resist the introduction of GM foods if there was sufficient evidence of a danger to human health or the environment.

By reducing the arguments to ones of trade and economics, rather than biodiversity and the protection of the environment, the US and the biotechs are seeking to undermine the Biosafety Protocol. An addition to the internationally-agreed Convention on Biological Diversity, it is designed to regulate the international trade, handling and use of any GM organisms and at its heart is the precautionary principle. This principle allows countries to ban or restrict the movements of such organisms when there is a lack of scientific knowledge or consensus regarding their safety.