Washington

Up in smoke: the WTO meeting in November was dogged by riots and ended in failure.

International negotiators gather this week in Montreal to try and negotiate a biosafety protocol that would regulate the international movement of living organisms. After the dramatic failure of last November's meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle, hopes for agreement may well be equally forlorn.

Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will meet to bridge divisions over whether a biosafety protocol should cover agricultural commodities, and whether it should take precedence over the rules on international trade set by the WTO.

As has become routine in environmental negotiations, deep divisions between the European Union and the United States and its food-exporting allies, including Canada and Argentina, will dominate the meeting. Europe favours a powerful biosafety protocol, whereas the US group's priority is to protect agricultural trade. Developing countries will broadly support the European position, and a small number of nations — known as the Compromise Group — will attempt to bridge the gap.

Only “a miracle” can produce an agreement, says Calestous Juma, former director of the CBD and now a professor at the Center for International Development at Harvard University. “The fundamental issue is between the European Union and North America: the rest of the world is coming along to watch.”

Two main issues divide Europe and the United States, negotiators say. One is the application of the biosafety protocol to commodity crops: the European Union and developing countries want it to govern crop movement, while the United States wants an agreement covering only living organisms.

The second, more vexing question is whether the protocol should contain a ‘savings clause’, which would concede its subserviance to WTO rules. “The European Union wants this to overrule the trading rules,” says one European diplomat in Washington. “The United States will never agree to that.”

Failure to break this impasse in Montreal — on top of two rounds of largely fruitless meetings since the parties failed to resolve the issue last February in Cartegena, Colombia — could spell trouble for the CBD, one of three international mechanisms established to protect the global environment at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.

Juma says that failure to negotiate a biosafety protocol will damage the credibility of the convention as a means of tackling more complex issues, such as the sharing of genetic resources.

But a senior US government official says recent discussions have been “less ideological and more constructive” than at Cartagena, adding: “We come to Montreal prepared to negotiate in good faith.”