U.S. Derails Biosafety Protocol.

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 - disagreed, arguing that in much of the developing world, food and feed commodities arc often used for seed, though not explicitly intended as such. These delegates argued that transgenic commodities would inevitably find their way into the wild, and that humans still have little understanding of how transgenic crops, or the genes they contain, may behave if they spread into the wild. Plants or genetic traits that prove particularly fit in a natural setting may out-compete other species or reek similar havoc on other wild populations.

Sateeaved Seebaluck, a delegate from Mauritius, complained that the final result of the Biosafety Protocol to preserve biodiversity resembled more of a "biotrade" protocol. Issues that were dropped from the final draft included the labeling of products derived from genetically modified organisms, placing liability and responsibility for transgenic materials on exporters, and granting grounds for refusing imports of transgenic organisms based on socio-economic or human health concerns. Delegates agreed to suspend the talks but re-open negotiations no later than May 2000.