The Beef War
Moanin' over hormones
Hormonal politics
Nutty, dangerous genes
Guessing game?
Udder woes
Above: Nice day for a walk.
Courtesy the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.
Right: A specter is haunting Europe --
the specter of hormone-raised beef.
Courtesy European Parliament.
Explaining Europe's beef over beef
That ban was another salvo in the continuing war between nations that want to regulate trade based on health concerns and the free-trade-oriented World Trade Organization.
If Europe imposes the complete ban as threatened on June 15, 1999, the United States is set to counterattack with punitive tariffs on European goods. A compromise is possible, but unlikely, according to Len Condon, vice-president of the American Meat Institute, a trade group for meat packers. He notes that the European Parliament is in recess until October, and all 20 members of the European Commission (the Union's administrative body) recently resigned.
Officials at the European Union did not answer our request for an interview, but there's no question that after the mad-cow disaster, many Europeans are severely cowed by the thought of dangerous food. This May, after finding that some "hormone-free" U.S. beef carried residues of synthetic hormones, the European Parliament unanimously backed the exclusion of all U.S. beef, hormone-free and hormone-rich.
Although Condon refuses to call the showdown a "trade war," he says the United States should fight back. "The only choice the U.S. is left with is retaliation. That's the position we're in."
Condon, who formerly worked with the U.S. Trade Representative's office, adds that the Europeans helped push the WTO's requirement that trade barriers based on health hazards must be backed by science. "When we negotiated the WTO, it was clearly in the back of everybody's minds that the hormone ban was something we were trying to protect against in the future. Everyone agreed that you should not be creating these trade barriers without any scientific basis."
Their real beef
But some observers contend that the bogeyman of better beef is the ban's basis. "There would be a danger of the European beef industry being in serious jeopardy if U.S. beef was available," says James Marsden, a former chief scientist of the American Meat Institute. American steers, he argues, are bred and raised specifically for slaughter, while most European beef comes from tough, old dairy cows.
Marsden argues that the ban also reflects a simple over-supply of beef on the continent. "I've lost any confidence that any science is driving this. It's a convenient way to prevent competition."
For her part, Susan Brewer of the University of Illinois sees a cultural dimension at work. Tolerances and preferences for food differ in Europe and the United States. Germans, she notes, are more accepting of herbal medicines and less of synthetic drugs, while the opposite attitude prevails in the United States. These preferences, she says, help define attitudes: Is hormone-treated beef innocent until proven guilty, or vice versa?
Don't believe "cultural filters" play a role? Then compare the quick acceptance of genetically engineered food in the United States to the uproar it is sparking in Europe.
Eating much genetically engineered food? (Yum, yum!)
According to Condon, "What's really driving this is that European politicians want to be able to tell consumers, 'There's a danger, and we're protecting you from it.'" Protection against dangerous food is a real concern in Europe, where food regulators in the United Kingdom sat on their hands while thousands of cows died of mad cow disease.
