US accuses EU of undermining global food security

The US has accused the EU of undermining efforts to improve global food security by proposing new rules that would allow any of its 28 member states to opt out of decisions by Brussels to open the door to genetically modified crops.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Tom Vilsack, the US agriculture secretary, said the move also raised "serious issues" about the future of transatlantic trade talks.

"If we are serious about global food security then we have to be very serious about the science that will allow us to be as productive as possible in the most sustainable way possible," Mr Vilsack said on the eve of a meeting of G20 agriculture ministers to discuss efforts to improve global food security.

"The EU's decision potentially . . . creates a serious obstacle to meeting the challenge of global food security," he told the FT. "It is, in our view, inconsistent with the notion that we would have a science-based, rules-based [global] system."

The world has made progress in tackling malnourishment and the issue of food security in recent years, he said. Yet 850m people in the world are still malnourished and, with the global population growing and the effects of climate change looming, more needs to be done.

The answers would have to come in large part from increasing agricultural productivity through technological innovation, Mr Vilsack said, with experts projecting that production would have to increase 60-70 per cent by 2050 to feed the 9bn people expected to be living on the planet by then. To do that would require a level of innovation in food production over the next 35 years equivalent to that seen over the past 10,000 years, Mr Vilsack said.

The EU has long had a much more sceptical view of genetically modified organisms than the US and has heavily restricted their trade.

The European Commission last month proposed giving individual member states the ability to opt out of any decisions it made to expand the heavily restricted list of genetically modified grains allowed into the EU. The move, which was accompanied by a decision to authorise 19 more GM products for distribution in the EU, was widely seen as a political fudge meant to accommodate public opposition to GMOs in countries such as France and Germany.

But it immediately drew an angry reaction from the US.

Officials in Washington have since not only expressed anger about the impact on efforts to secure a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) but also have raised the possibility of bringing the EU to the World Trade Organisation if the proposal becomes law.

In Washington on Monday, Cecilia Malmstrom, the EU's trade commissioner, defended the decision and said the EU was confident it complied with both WTO rules and the union's internal market regulations.

Mr Vilsack, a former governor of the agricultural state of Iowa, said he accepted that there were different view points on GM crops in both the EU and the US, where a growing number of states are considering GMO labelling laws.

But "that's not the point", he said. "The point is if you're going to establish a trade relationship and you are committed to open trade, you are committed to a science-based system . . . you can't inject the culture or the politics or consumer choice into the discussions."

He added: "The consumer can make the choices in the context of an open market . . . The problem is you are basically constraining the market in order to avoid having consumer choice. And that's inconsistent with the notion that you want a trade relationship with the EU that creates less friction in the system as opposed to more friction.

"This creates more friction. This creates a lot more friction. It creates serious issues as to whether we will even get a TTIP. I'm not sure why the Europeans aren't willing to let the market decide."

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