The agreement requires exporters to label shipments that contain genetically altered commodities such as corn or cotton. It also tries to dictate how its safety rules will coexist with free trade rules governed by the World Trade Organization.
The protocol is intended to protect the environment from damage due to genetically modified organisms (GMO). Environmentalists and some scientists worry that bioengineered plants, animals and bacteria could wipe out native strains or spread their genetic advantages to weeds and other undesirable species.
The agreement is called the U.N. Biosafety Protocol. A first attempt to draw up the protocol ended last February in Cartagena, Colombia, when the United States and five partners blocked an agreement that was acceptable to the other 125 countries.
The new agreement on products with genetically modified organisms came after a week of intense negotiations that pitted the United States and its five allies in the talks - Canada, Australia, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay - against the European Union (EU) and a coalition of developing nations.
The EU and developing nations had argued that countries should be allowed to refuse imports of a genetically modified product if little is known about its environmental effect. The U.S. and its partners had disagreed, saying many of the proposed rules would restrict trade.
The political situation changed in the last year, with major U.S. food producers like Archer Daniels Midland and Gerber, either demanding that genetically modified products be segregated from other products or refusing to use them altogether.
And protests at the World Trade Organization talks in Seattle last month also suggested that the American public has concerns.
EU negotiators, whose constituency strongly opposes genetic modifications in food, used the changed climate to exact a number of concessions from the U.S. delegation.
In the end, the sides’ most serious differences turned out to be over how the biosafety protocol would relate to WTO rules, and whether shipments of genetically modified commodities should be labeled.
Environmentalists have complained in recent years that the WTO’s free trade pact has overridden regulations meant to protect human and ecological health. But the agreement calls for the biosafety protocol and the WTO rules to be “mutually supportive” with nothing “intended to subordinate this protocol to other international agreements.”
Under the protocol, exporters will at first be required to apply the label “may contain living modified organisms” to all shipments containing genetically altered commodities.
In a legal question mark, the U.S. has neither signed nor ratified the biodiversity treaty that oversees the protocol. So technically, the U.S. is not bound to honor it.
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