WASHINGTON, April 19 (Reuters) - A top executive of Swiss life sciences
giant Novartis AG warned on Monday that attempts by the United States to
force European borders open to genetically modified food products were
doomed to failure because of European public resistance. Some agricultural
analysts have predicted a trade fight between the United States, which
wants to sell genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and European countries
that are resisting the products because of fears about their safety. "We
are hoping and praying that the U.S. government will not make this into a
trade issue, because I can assure you it is not a trade issue," Willy De
Greef, the company's head of regulatory and government affairs, told
Reuters. "But if tomorrow the WTO (World Trade Organization) would rule
that we have to throw our markets open, and the European Union governments
would comply with that without doing 10 years of appeals, the issue would
not go away," he said.
The European Union's regulatory process has halted imports of GMO products,
produced mainly by the United States, such as corn or canola genetically
altered to produce results like better resistance to insects or tolerance
of herbicides. De Greef said Europeans viewed food and food production as a
cultural and historical matter and were not as quick as the United States
to accept radical technological changes. Retail stores in Britain, where
memories of deaths from "mad cow disease" remain fresh, have been labeling
GMO foods despite U.S. assurances of their safety. "All the companies, we
all owe the public a mea culpa. We have not listened carefully enough," De
Greef said at a meeting of agricultural journalists from the United States
and Canada.
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman said earlier the United States and
Europe might be heading toward a "major conflict" over sales of beef grown
with synthetic hormones. De Greef said Novartis supported GMO labeling. "If
the public in a particular country says that for whatever reason it chooses
-- be it religious, be it safety, be it ethical -- it wants to have that
choice, then we are damned well going to provide the means to have that
choice," he said. He forecast it would take five to 10 years for Europeans
to accept the products.
"Because now there is fear," he said. "There's nothing more difficult to
turn around than fear." The United States in February won a world trade
dispute that found its "hormone" beef was safe and that Europe must remove
its barriers to the meat by mid-May.
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