The deliberations of the World Trade Organization (WTO), in the context of the global economy, carry far more weight than the legislative bodies of many sovereign governments. The path that the organization chooses at Seattle will therefore play a major part in determining the international viability of transgenic technology. Government representatives and others attending the WTO's third biennial ministerial meeting will be under pressure to handle the issue with extreme care, aware that differences between the United States and Europe could easily spark a damaging trade war. But the WTO meeting will feature divisions not just between the United States and Europe, but between rich and poor nations.

There are two areas of negotiation at Seattle where the interests of rich and poor nations are set to clash. The first concerns a proposal, originally put forward by Canada and Japan, to establish a ‘working party’ at the WTO expressly to deal with biotechnology issues. The casual observer might ask, who could possibly object? We all admire work and like parties, and deferring a thorny problem for further study never did anyone any harm.

In this case, however, developing countries are viewing the working party with considerable suspicion. Because the WTO has become so powerful, some fear that its formal involvement in the question of agricultural biotechnology could undermine other international agreements — such as any biosafety protocol that may one day be negotiated under the Convention on Biological Diversity — that are potentially more sensitive to environmental concerns.

The biodiversity convention carries at least the potential of helping developing countries to conserve and exploit their substantial biological resources. They are understandably concerned that WTO involvement will lead to environmental considerations being swamped by those of trade. The remit of any WTO group dealing with agricultural biotechnology must therefore be carefully circumscribed, at the very least. Free trade, whatever certain economists, politicians and professional trade negotiators at the WTO may believe, is not more important than the future of life on our planet.

The second source of North–South friction concerns the future of the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) agreement, as it applies to the patenting of plants and animals. TRIPs tries to globalize the type of intellectual property rights regime that protects innovation in the United States and Europe. The fine print of the agreement gives signatories until the end of this year to review a clause allowing a partial exemption for plants and animals.

At Seattle, the United States will be trying to maintain the status quo, while ensuring that the exemption is implemented in a way that allows substantive protection of genetic modifications of both types of organisms. But many developing countries want to expand the clause to bar the patenting of all forms of life. Next year, the whole TRIPs agreement is up for review, and developing countries will seek to revise what they view as its exploitative aspects.

The genes and methods behind agricultural biotechnology are already caught in a web of patent protection that affects the ability of researchers in developing countries to deliver the technology to poor farmers (see Briefing, pages 341–345). The Seattle meeting will be besieged by tens of thousands of demonstrators protesting against the entire negotiation as an affront to the world's poor, and heavily lobbied by agribusiness interests, pushing for open markets and tough controls of intellectual property rights. The best that can be hoped for in Seattle is a compromise deal, establishing a trading regime that will allow genetically modified food seed to enter markets at a pace acceptable to consumers, and plant breeders in developing countries to work with transgenic crop technology at an affordable cost. Even this modest goal, however, would be a substantial achievement in the current, highly charged atmosphere.