Washington

Negotiators from 130 countries last week agreed on a Biosafety Protocol that will require exporters to identify genetically modified (GM) organisms, and allow importing countries to judge whether they pose environmental or health risks.

Snatching victory? Environmentalists are pleased with the Montreal agreement. Credit: AP

The surprise agreement bridges deep divisions between the United States and Europe on whether GM and non-GM food should be treated differently for trade purposes. It was reached early in the morning of 29 January, after four days of negotiation in Montreal (see Nature 403, 233; 2000).

The agreement states that bulk shipments of GM foods will be labelled as “containing genetically modified organisms”, and that a computer database maintained by the exporter will provide importing countries with information about their contents.

Importers can block shipments, even without “scientific certainty” that a commodity poses a risk. Environmentalists hailed this as a historic breakthrough — the first time that the so-called precautionary principle has been incorporated in an international agreement.

But the agreement — to be called the Cartagena Protocol, after the Colombian city where an earlier round of negotiations ended inconclusively last year — does not claim precedence over the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and exporters who believe they are being treated unfairly will still have recourse to the WTO.

The Biosafety Protocol is the first treaty based on the Convention on Biological Diversity, established at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. The United States — the largest exporter of GM food — has not ratified the convention, but it played a leading role in the Montreal negotiations and says that it will abide by the protocol.

Although the protocol was conceived chiefly to control the introduction of living organisms into foreign ecosystems, discussions soon became embroiled in arguments about bulk movements of grain. In Cartagena, the United States and some of its food-exporting allies sought to exclude grain shipments from the protocol, arguing that they posed no environmental or health risk, and that a protocol that included commodities would be used to bar imports of US grain.

But observers say that US and European negotiators at Montreal were under pressure to obtain an agreement after the failure of last November's WTO talks in Seattle. Agricultural biotechnology companies, who had encouraged the US to oppose a protocol covering commodities, were prepared to accept the relatively mild controls on commodity shipments: these will not come into force until two years after the protocol is ratified by 50 countries.