U.S. Derails Biosafety Protocol.

• Author: Halweil, Brian

After a week of negotiations in Cartagena, Colombia, delegates representing 174 nations failed to reach a consensus on the Biosafety Protocol - the first global treaty designed to safeguard the world's biodiversity from possible adverse effects of transgenic or genetically modified organisms. The United States and a handful of other nations squelched attempts to forge an eleventh-hour agreement by the February 22 deadline when they rejected a watered-down proposal they said would inhibit the growth of the multi-billion dollar global biotechnology industry.

The Biosafety Protocol - an outgrowth of the Convention on Biological Diversity reached at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro - will regulate genetically modified organisms by designating which products need prior consent before they are shipped to an importing nation. The primary disagreement over the protocol involved whether agricultural commodities, such as soybeans or potatoes, would also be subject to this advance approval.

With three-quarters of the global transgenic area in 1998 located on U.S. soil, the United States leads a group of six agricultural exporters (the others are Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, and Uruguay) who would have liked to see agricultural commodities - which they consider "dead" and posing no threat to the environment - dropped from the protocol.

Most other nations - likely to be importers of these products...