July, 2001: Cover Story

By Greg Rushford
Published in The Rushford Report

McDonalds

It is a strange feeling to be told at a McDonald’s in London that your cheesburger “is safe” because it didn’t come from America.

LONDON—Last month, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick and the European Union’s trade commissioner, Pascal Lamy, enthused that they were working on “possible solutions” to longstanding efforts by the American beef industry to get into European markets. “Progress” was being made, they said.
Some progress. This beef over U.S. Prime has been going on for more than 14 years. The Americans have won one legal victory after another in the WTO and its predecessor GATT. The Europeans still won’t buy American beef in general, and U.S. hormone-treated beef in particular. Meanwhile, governments and lobbies like Greenpeace spread scare stories about “funny food” that have become ingrained in popular culture. While the Europeans stall for time, the American beef industry remains stuck in the stockyards, losing perhaps $500 million in business every year.

On the surface, this doesn’t make sense. Ordinary Americans have been eating better meat (and grains) at better prices than Europeans (bar royalty) since the mid-1800s. By the turn of the 20th century, the average Englishman loved his roast beef, but rarely saw much of it on his dinner table. European steaks have the texture of shoe leather. Thank goodness for French cuisine, mushroom- and pepper sauces, and the like. So, why are European citizens not happy with the thought of buying affordable, delicious U.S. Prime?

For the answer, think of Mark Twain’s 19th century Connecticut Yankee. The fictional hero in A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court was a typical American who was transported back in time into the medieval, definitely unscientific England of King Arthur‘s court. There, Merlin’s magic, superstition and fears of innovation held great sway. By contrast, the American was practical, innovative, and confident that science could improve his life. Unlike his cousins across the Pond, this American believed that he could always better his life by finding any “new-fangled way to make a thing.”

Where should Twain’s Yankee go, if he could visit today’s London?

First, he could stop in to slurp some spicy chicken ramen at Wagamama, a trendy Japanese noodle bar in Covent Garden. Later, he could order a cheeseburger at the McDonald’s that is right across the Thames River from the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. During two weeks here in June, I visited both establishments, and received a quick education in politically correct food.
Wagamama is a clean, attractive place, with smooth blonde wood tables, a veggie-juice bar, and a style that is sort of a fusion of Tokyo’s Roppongi district and California. And Wagamama understands what its customers (don’t) want. “We have worked with our food suppliers to ensure that genetically modified food stuffs are not used,” the menu reports. Diners are encouraged to inquire about “our due diligence process if you need further reassurance” that what you are eating is GMO free.

I asked a waitress if she could tell me what was dangerous about ingesting genetically modified food. In America, we eat GM food all the time, I told her. Are we poisoning ourselves? She laughed, shook her head, and finally said, “I have no idea what the risks are.” The young lady summoned a colleague, who also laughed and said he didn‘t know either. Wagamama was merely responding to a marketplace where consumers want nothing to do with GM food, he explained. “It’s political, based on the concerns we have read about.”

At the McDonald’s where you can munch on a Big Mac in sight of Big Ben, I was reassured by a helpful young woman at the counter that it was okay to order a cheeseburger. “There is no American beef in your cheeseburger,” she declared. “It’s safe.” She said that with no sense of irony, right there in the land of Mad Cows and Foot and Mouth — a land where the government has recently killed more than 4 million cows and pigs, rather than merely vaccinate them. When McDonald’s employees — McDonald’s — assure you that your cheeseburger “is safe” because it has no American beef in it, you have to kind of marvel.
Welcome to Cloud Cuckoo Land. Don’t get me wrong. I’m an Anglophile. Tony Blair is our best friend in Nato. He is with us on missile defense. If he had his way, the European Union would radically reform its horrendous Common Agricultural Policy of subsidies that distort global markets, big time. (Blair’s political task eased somewhat by the fact that Brits pay more into the EU budget for farm subsidies than they get back.) Blair has even warned that scare mongering about GM foods is unwise.

But nobody can visit London and fail to understand that the Old World’s historic popular aversion to science did not end with Merlin the Magician.

Well, not everybody. The problem for U.S. trade representative Zoellick is that his predecessor, Charlene Barshefsky, didn’t quite get it. Barshefsky didn’t really understand the political impossibility of forcing American science on Europeans. She didn’t understand that while American lawyers can do wondrous things in court, they simply can’t get judges on WTO dispute-resolution panels to order Europeans to eat U.S. Prime.

Lawyer Barshefsky slapped on $117 million in trade sanctions against the European Union in 1999 after it became apparent that Europe was not going to honor its WTO obligations to stop discriminating against American beef. Since then, the EU not only has not budged, but has retaliated against the United States for winning the beef case (and the other famous one involving the EU’s protectionist quota/license scheme on bananas). Then EU-trade chief Leon Brittan got a WTO panel to determine that the U.S. Foreign Sales Corporation tax is a WTO-illegal subsidy for American exporters.

In beef and bananas, the United States “won” some $300 million dollars in sanctions. In FSC, the EU — which won its latest legal round in the WTO in June — is holding the threat of some $4 billion in sanctions over our heads. Everyone knows that the Americans, who are in the habit of insisting rather rudely that other WTO members honor their legal obligations, don’t want to do so with FSC (or steel). This is why the FSC case is called Sir Leon’s Revenge.
Zoellick settled the banana case earlier this year by basically giving up, allowing the Europeans to keep their quotas and licenses until 2006, with a promise of high tariffs to keep out foreigners after that. He would now like to clear the decks of the beef case the same way.

Basically, Zoellick and Lamy are talking about forgetting about the idea that Europeans would buy U.S. hormone-treated beef. In return, the EU would promise to buy a bit more American non-hormone treated beef. Right now, the EU has a quota for non-hormone treated beef of a little over 11,000 metric tons, which is about one tenth of one percent of European markets. Zoellick would like to get the Europeans to agree to triple or quadruple this, which would bring some money into American pockets but would still represent less than one percent of the EU market. (Such a quota should be WTO-illegal, but the Europeans got it protected in the Uruguay Round.)

Zoellick hopes that with beef and bananas off the table, the EU would let the U.S. off the hook on FSC.

What about the other U.S. option: sticking to free-trade principles? Persuading the European public that GM food is safe, and that it offers wonderful possibilities of feeding the world’s poor, is about as easy getting the Pope and the Anglican Church back on the same track regarding divorce.

In London, everyone seems to have a cigarette dangling from his or her mouth. But these health-conscious people blanche at the thought that some American tenderloins that were fattened up with the help of growth hormones might pass through their lips. “American cows are dirty,” a woman from Dover who had a cockney accent that would make Eliza Doolittle proud told me. “Your cows are different,” I was told repeatedly. Even Prince Charles came out against funny food two years ago. He did acknowledge that “genetic manipulation could lead to major advances in medicine, agriculture and the good health of the environment.” Still, the princely view was that such wonders of science take us “into areas that should be left to God.”

Whenever GM foods are mentioned in the press here, you will usually see words like “tainted” and “contamination” nearby. Even Feelgood, a hilarious political satire now playing at the Garrick, gets into the act. The play lampoons the political traumas when a Tony Blair-like government somehow bungles by getting GM-treated hops into beer, thus causing English gentlemen to grow breasts.

While there is much silliness afoot when the topic of GM food comes up, it doesn’t do much good to reason with people here. “I have spoiled dinner parties here” by trying to explain the benefits of GM food, relates S. Linn Williams, who was deputy U.S. trade representative under the first President Bush. Living in London for the past several years, Williams learned the social hazards of uttering such sensible observations as: “Europeans have been eating genetically modified food for a very long time, ever since the first farmer grafted two stalks together to make a sweeter or hardier grape.”

In large part, public ignorance has been shaped by various lobby groups here, which preach an anti-science message that is akin to a religion. Greenpeace is here big time, of course. There is ActionAid, which has convinced itself that GM food “could further impoverish poor farmers by forcing them to buy expensive seeds.” ActionAid, which raised more than $60 million in 1998, goes around telling villagers in places like India that they should be scared of U.S. companies like Monsanto. Even the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has gotten into the anti-GM act. You can laugh, but the birdwatchers have more members than both major British political parties. “The story of Canute telling the tide not to come in is one that could be examined with value,” comments Val Giddings, a scientist who serves as vice president food and agriculture of the Biotechnology Industry Organization in Washington, D.C.

Giddings explains other reasons for the paranoia: In part, the Europeans are trying to protect their own would-be Monsantos from falling further behind in research, just as the EU once tried (unsuccessfully) to protect its comparatively feeble electronics industry from the Americans with tariff barriers. Many big European biotech companies have relocated their R&D operations to the United States, where the regulatory environment is more favorable. Meanwhile, there has been one scandal after another where European governments have frightened their citizens about science: including mad cows in Britain; dioxin-contaminated animal feed in Belgium, which authorities sat on; and AIDS cover-ups in France. “European governments have not yet learned from experience, and have painted themselves into a corner,” Giddings declares.

Another political constraint involves the European Union’s farm subsidies. The Common Agricultural Policy eats up about half of the EU’s budget. More expensive headaches are coming about 2004, when countries like Poland become members and will want in on the scam. GM technology offers increasing capacity for production. So if Europe — which already grows too much food because of CAP subsidies — modernized its agriculture by adopting GM techniques, the political problem over CAP would hardly go away.

Even on the flight back to Washington, there were signs of anti-GM paranoia. The fine print in Virgin Atlantic’s menu on the flight from London asked passengers with concerns about whether they might be eating any GM food to consult with the flight attendant. When I did, the attendant didn’t know any more than the staff at the Wagamama noodle bar in Covent Garden. But when he checked, it turned out that everything on the menu from the salad and entree to the dessert is likely to have GM in it. Of course.

And guess where high-ranking EU officials are likely to go when they land in Washington?

“We have seen them immediately go to Morton’s or the Capital Grille,” reports Chandler Keys, III, vice president for public policy at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. “Even at Blair House, the White House mess has been known to cook up a bunch of hamburgers or steaks for European leaders.”

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