US Trade Representative Ms Charlene Barshefsky yesterday warned Europe that its refusal to lift a ban on hormone-treated American beef could jeopardise world free trade talks and make sanctions on European goods inevitable.
Barshefsky used a visit to the OECD annual meeting in Paris to raise the heat on the European Union and was to meet senior EU trade negotiator Leon Brittan during her two-day stay. As she spoke, Canada said at the headquarters of the World Trade Organisation in Geneva that it too planned to impose hefty sanctions on European goods for the same reason. Washington is preparing sanctions worth $202 million on various EU goods.
"We do not have the sense that Europe has any serious intent to negotiate a solution to this issue," Ms Barshefsky said on the sidelines of a meeting of envoys from the 29 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Barshefsky said the WTO had backed Washington's case, but that the EU was ignoring the findings of WTO panels and this smacked of a bad habit which hurt relations in the past.
"We cannot maintain a multilateral trading regime on the basis of selective compliance with panel rulings," she said, adding that the EU stand was "exceptionally debilitating" for global free trade talks due to start in Seattle in November.
"Europe continues [what is] perhaps a 30-year pattern of refusing to accept panel decisions," she told reporters.
Farm trade disputes between Europe and the United States were one of the main reasons why it took eight years to complete the last set of world trade talks in the early 1990s.
Washington points to studies saying hormone-enhanced beef is totally safe for human consumption, while the Europeans continue to argue that there may be cancer or other health risks.
Brittan made no comment to the press yesterday but fellow European Commissioner YvesThibault de Silguy dismissed Ms Barshefsky's accusations, telling reporters: "Europe is the most open market in the world."
Ms Barshefsky said Europe had refused to compromise on beef, just one in a series of conflicts between the two blocs.
Washington is also upset with an EU import regime that gives preferential treatment to bananas from former European colonies, at the expense of those produced in Latin America by US firms.
