The Truth about Trade

By John Reifsteck:  Champaign, Illinois 

If it’s not hard, it’s not worth doing. 

U.S. and EU trade diplomats must keep this slogan in mind as they prepare to negotiate a sweeping free-trade agreement between the United States and the European Union. 

Success would deliver a big boost to economies on both sides of the Atlantic, as phony barriers to the flow of goods, services, and investments come down. Europe is already America’s largest export market, worth about $459 billion last year and supporting about 2.4 million jobs, according to federal statistics. 

The good news is that we can do even better: One estimate says that a wise agreement would pump nearly $100 billion to the U.S. economy. It would function like a job-creating stimulus program, without costing taxpayers anything or adding to the national debt. 

The bad news is that a few voices are already suggesting that we limit our expectations, especially in agriculture, even before formal talks begin next month. We’re hearing murmurs about how everything would go a lot more smoothly if only we didn’t have to argue about biotechnology.

But argue we must, because genetically modified crops are a fundamental issue for American farmers. This is a fight worth having. 

Here in the United States, our science-based regulations approve biotechnology as a safe tool of sustainable agriculture. The technology allows us to grow more crops on less land, helping us feed the world and conserve resources at the same time. The vast majority of our corn, soybeans, and cotton are genetically modified, as they are throughout much of the western hemisphere. 

In Europe, however, everything is political, including the regulatory process that controls what products farmers can use. Many scientific groups in Europe, such as Britain’s Royal Society, have endorsed GM crops. So have sensible environmentalists such as Mark Lynas. Yet European governments ignore these recommendations, preferring to let anti-biotech activists drive consumer ignorance and dictate policies. 

So GM crops have become a major area of transatlantic disagreement—a non-tariff barrier to healthy commerce in food. The coming round of trade talks represents an excellent opportunity to change this by harmonizing rules and reaching a smart resolution. 

We should seize this moment. Rather than running away from a difficult conversation, we should confront it and do our best to persuade Europe on the safety and sustainability of biotechnology. 

It may not even be as hard as we fear. 

Here’s a secret: Many Europeans actually want the United States to win this dispute. 

Don’t get me wrong. Europe’s opposition to GM crops is strong and we should treat it seriously. Yet it may not be as formidable as some officials and pundits would have us believe. 

Last November, I traveled to London for an agriculture conference. Its theme was "sustainable intensification of agriculture" but in reality the discussion was about the European regulatory system and how it stifles agriculture production.  This politicized regulatory process is making it difficult for Europe to feed itself. 

If the meeting had been in the United States, it would have been focused on technical issues, with panels talking about choosing the right seeds, battling weeds, and growing more food. In the London meeting it was obvious that the participants believed the greater challenge to agriculture was politics and unscientific regulation.

Farmers hate this, no matter where we live. We’d rather plant our fields and harvest our crops than fill out piles of paperwork and butt heads with bureaucrats. 

An attendee from a European country surprised me with a private conversation: "Please push us on biotechnology." He believes Europe needs to accept GM foods and believes that can occur with pressure from America.

In other words, a number of Europeans understand and appreciate the virtue of GM crops. They’re ready and willing to talk. Along the way, they may make loud complaints about hardheaded American negotiators, but they’ll also budge from their position, make concessions, and allow progress.

Is this an optimistic view? Perhaps. But it makes sense to start these talks with a spirit of hopefulness and a desire to achieve.

When British Prime Minister David Cameron visited the White House last month, he spoke on how the United States and Europe should have wide-ranging conversations on trade: "That means everything on the table, even the difficult issues, and no exceptions." 

Let’s take him at his word. Rather than taking biotechnology off the table, let’s make it a centerpiece.

John Reifsteck is a corn and soybean producer in Champaign County Illinois.  He volunteers as a Board Member for Truth About Trade & Technology (www.truthabouttrade.org).  Follow us: @TruthAboutTrade on Twitter | Truth About Trade & Technology on Facebook.

 By Terry Wanzek:  Jamestown, North Dakota

When a farmer discovered biotech wheat on a remote field in eastern Oregon in April, he found the agricultural equivalent of a needle in a haystack—a few stalks amid more than half a billion acres of wheat planted and harvested in the last dozen years.

The detection made headlines around the world not merely because the needle was hard to find but because it wasn’t supposed to exist at all: Genetically modified wheat was developed, tested, and proven safe for human consumption but it was not commercialized.

The last approved field-test planting of GM wheat in Oregon was in 2001, according to the Department of Agriculture. The most recent field test anywhere in the United States was in 2005. Since then, American farmers have grown more than 500 million acres of wheat. That’s an area larger than the state of Alaska.

Amid this enormous bounty of crops, someone spotted a small handful of plants that shouldn’t have sprouted from Oregon’s soil.   

As a North Dakota wheat producer, the first thing I want you to know is that GM wheat doesn’t put anyone at risk. "The detection of this wheat variety does not pose a safety concern," said the USDA in a statement last week. 

The technology in question—herbicide resistance that helps crops fight weeds—is well understood and commonly used in corn and soybeans. We eat safe and nutritious food derived from it every day. This trait was not commercialized in wheat for the simple economic worry that foreign buyers would refuse it because they have not yet embraced farming’s biotech revolution. 

So the biggest question over the GM wheat in Oregon is not whether it’s safe—we know with confidence that it is—but rather how it got there in the first place. Authorities must launch a thorough investigation that examines every possibility, from the misplacement of seeds during field tests years ago to the survival of a few stray plants in the wild.

And let’s not discount the possibility of mischief: The enemies of biotechnology are thrilled by this discovery because they think it gives modern agriculture a black eye. 

Meanwhile, let’s learn two lessons from this episode. 

The first is that we have an outstanding system of food regulation in the United States. It’s so good that it can spot an isolated event in an Oregon wheat field and help us begin the process of understanding what happened.

The second is that we have nothing to fear from biotech wheat.  

This is a safe product. Both farmers and consumers would benefit from its commercialization. It would allow wheat farmers to grow more food and reduce their production costs. These savings ultimately would find their way into grocery stores, where consumers would pay less for bread, cereal, pasta, and other products that come from our wheat fields. 

This is more than merely a missed opportunity. Our wheat supply already suffers from a lack of biotechnology. Many farmers are switching away from wheat because it’s a less predictable crop than corn and soybeans, which have been improved so much by genetic modification.

On my own farm in North Dakota, we’ve been cutting back every year on wheat. We used to grow it on as much as 80 percent of our acreage. Now we’re down to about 10 percent, mainly because we prefer the advantages of biotechnology in corn and soybeans. My neighbors have been doing the same.

Convincing Americans about the advantages of biotechnology never has been the main issue. The United States, along with Canada and most of the Western hemisphere, already has accepted biotechnology as an excellent tool option for farmers and consumers. 

It’s time for the rest of the world to catch up. 

When news of the GM wheat discovery hit the media, our buyers in Japan and Korea immediately suspended purchases and promised to test samples. Europe said that it would increase its testing of wheat as well. 

They almost certainly won’t find anything: It looks highly unlikely that any GM wheat entered the food supply. Korea’s first test results, announced on Monday, appeared to confirm this. 

Yet the time to commercialize GM wheat is past due. The sooner everyone stops fussing over a safe and healthy product, the sooner farmers and consumers all over the world will benefit. 

Terry Wanzek is a wheat, corn and soybean producer in North Dakota.  He serves as a ND State Senator and volunteers as a board member for Truth About Trade & Technology (www.truthabouttrade.org).  Follow us: @TruthAboutTrade on Twitter | Truth About Trade & Technology on Facebook.

By Gabriel Carballal:  Mercedes, Uruguay

Farmers believe that every day should be for the environment, because we depend on the environment to produce the food the world demands. We need good plants, good soil, and good weather. Without a good environment, we’re helpless.

That’s why we must take advantage of opportunities such as next week’s World Environment Day. Think of it as a second Earth Day. Each June 5, the United Nations sponsors WED. This year’s theme is "Think.Eat.Save." Organizers have a specific request: "reduce your footprint." 

Here on my farm in Uruguay, that’s what we do all year round, thanks to advances in technology.

My family farms almost 6,000 hectares (roughly 15,000 acres) near the town of Mercedes, in Soriano. Our most important crops are soybeans, but we also grow corn, sorghum, wheat, barley, canola, oats, and grass seeds. The weather is variable but we never see snow, which allows us to plant for 12 months. 

We started growing GM crops 16 years ago. It became obvious immediately that they’re excellent for conservation. 

As the website for WED points out, agriculture accounts for 80 percent of the world’s deforestation. This is the result of pressure to convert wilderness into farmland, to keep pace with a booming global population. To protect what remains, we must produce more food on less land—and that’s exactly what biotechnology lets us do. 

The first year we planted GM soybeans on our farm, in 1997, we tried it on 30 hectares. The results were amazing. Within two years, we had converted entirely to GM soybeans. When biotechnology came to corn in 2004, we quickly switched to it as well. Genetic enhancement drove our yields upward because these excellent crops are so good at fighting weeds and pests. 

Our experience shows that science can help us produce more with less—the very definition of sustainable agriculture. 

There are other benefits as well. We’re now able to do a much better job of maintaining natural pastures for a combined crop-cattle operation. This helps us preserve biodiversity. 

Best of all, however, is our no-till farming system. Soil erosion is a huge challenge for farmers around the planet, but our soil is actually improving each year. Our crops pump carbon into the soil, and we can keep it there because we no longer need to fight weeds by tilling the soil after harvesting. At the end of the growing season, we simply leave the straw on top of the soil. 

A friend of mine, Carlos Crovetto of Chile, puts it well: "Grains are for the people, straw and residues are for the soil."

GM crops make this possible. 

Here’s another statistic from the WED website: Agriculture is responsible for 30 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

And here’s another benefit of biotechnology: Because we plant GM crops, our greenhouse gas emissions have dropped sharply. We’re doing our part to combat climate change.

I can plant all of my fields with just two big tractors, an air drill, a planter, a big sprayer, and two combines. I’ve seen much smaller farms that use a lot more equipment, spewing out carbon emissions at a far higher rate than we do.

GM crops allow us to reduce the number of times we have to drive over our fields, which means that our environmental footprint has shrunk.

It’s like we’ve reduced our shoe size. When does that ever happen?

Other advantages are harder to spot but they’re equally real. Consider tire wear. I can buy a tractor, use if for 8,000 hours, and sell it with the same tires. This is important because petroleum is an important ingredient in tire manufacturing. The more use we can get out of our tires, the better—it’s good for my bottom line as well as for the environment.

Unfortunately, many nations resist biotech crops because they don’t understand the benefits. Farmers like me in South America already know why GM farming makes sense, as do farmers in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere.

If we’re going to continue reducing footprints around the world, what we must do is spread the word—and on World Environment Day, the United Nations should help us.

Gabriel Carballal farms with his father in Mercedes, Uruguay, growing soybeans, corn, wheat, barley, canola, oats, grass seeds, sorghum and raise beef.  Gabriel is a member of the Truth About Trade & Technology Global Farmer Network (www.truthabouttrade.org).  Follow us: @TruthAboutTrade on Twitter | Truth About Trade & Technology on Facebook.

 By Dean Kleckner:  Des Moines, Iowa

With the election of Brazil’s Roberto Azevedo as the next director-general of the World Trade Organization, it’s time to hope for a "Nixon goes to China" moment. 

In 1972, President Nixon traveled to Communist China and met with Mao Zedong, marking a new and more productive phase for relations between the United States and China. It was also a diplomatic feat that only a political leader with Nixon’s anti-Communist credentials could have pulled off. Just about anybody else would have suffered dearly in the fallout.

Perhaps in the future, we’ll speak of "Azevedo goes to Geneva." 

That’s because the Brazilian, who will assume the position of Director General in September, may be just the person to revive the WTO at a turning point in its history.

Several commentators were quick to express skepticism about Azevedo. "Brazil has not been the most positive partner at the WTO," said Ernesto Zedillo, former president of Mexico, in the Wall Street Journal. "Brazil doesn’t have the best credentials to lead the WTO. As a country that tends to be protectionist, it’s not a great champion of a multilateral trading system."

The European Union favored a different candidate, Herminio Blanco of Mexico. The United States remained officially neutral, though many Americans also seemed to prefer Blanco over Azevedo because he helped negotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. 

Whereas Mexico appears to have embraced global free trade, Brazil recently has moved to protect its own favored industries, even though it already has one of the world’s lowest rates of trade to GDP.

Despite these concerns, Azevedo may have a tremendous upside: Developing countries trust him as a champion of their interests. This could prove important, because they’ve become an obstacle to completing a new multilateral trade agreement that improves the flow of goods and services around the world. 

In 2001, the WTO launched the "Doha round" of world trade talks. Yet these negotiations quickly fell into a stalemate. For all practical purposes, Doha is dead--and it’s been dead for a long time.

Its failure springs from many sources and there’s plenty of blame to spread around. Yet developing nations may have presented the most significant hurdle. Many of them approached the talks looking for a handout, believing that wealthier countries should make concessions, almost out of charity. They didn’t seem to understand the importance of opening their own markets to competition--and that any successful agreement involves a give and take from both sides.

Brazil played a central role in all of this. As a result, many developing countries believe Azevedo will be an ally at the WTO.  

And they may be right, though not in quite the way they expect. Rather than convincing wealthy nations to rethink their own Doha strategies, the main challenge for Azevedo will be to persuade developing countries to reconsider past approaches.

Success is essential. As Azevedo noted at a news conference last week, the WTO "is clearly stuck." He must now get it unstuck--and it may take a figure with his special credibility among the leaders of developing nations to make it happen.

If the WTO doesn’t come unstuck, it will still serve the useful function of arbitrating disputes between its members. Yet it will have lost one of its chief purposes, which is to lower trade barriers. 

It’s good to have big goals, but perhaps the WTO should think about playing small ball, at least for a short while. The Doha round was a swing for the fences. At this crucial juncture, however, it may be wiser to hope for a mere base hit--not a swing and a miss, but a solid knock that keeps the inning alive.

One idea may be to admit what everyone knows: Doha is dead, and it’s time to move on. Perhaps we need an entirely new round, with a new name.

That won’t magically change the geopolitical dynamics that caused WTO to reach its current impasse. Yet it could be an essential public-relations maneuver that revives global trade--and creates an opportunity for Azevedo to go to Geneva. 

Dean Kleckner is Chairman Emeritus for Truth About Trade & Technology   (www.truthabouttrade.org).  Follow us:  @TruthaboutTrade on Twitter / Truth About Trade & Technology on Facebook.

By Tim Burrack: Arlington, Iowa

When Americans speculate that the United States is "becoming Europe," we don’t mean that our art museums are getting a lot better.

Instead, we worry about the encroachments of a growing bureaucracy that is smothering freedom and innovation.

Last Friday, in an unexpected announcement, the U.S. Department of Agriculture took an unfortunate step toward Europeanization when it delayed the approval of two crops that will help farmers control weeds and produce more food. The decision didn’t receive much immediate attention outside the agricultural press, but it sent a troubling signal about the future of farm technology that should concern all Americans. 

At the heart of the controversy lie a couple of time-tested herbicides: dicamba and 2,4-D. Scientists have figured out a way for staple crops such as corn, soybeans, and cotton to resist these chemicals, which means that farmers can control weeds without hurting the plants they’re trying to grow. 

This is hardly a radical development. As the USDA acknowledged last week, these herbicides "have been safely and widely used across the country since the 1960s." My father was using 2,4-D even before that, in the 1950s. It was the first herbicide he ever applied to his fields. It’s also one of the top ingredients in the weed-and-feed formulas that Americans apply to their lawns and gardens.

So why the sudden delay? Environmentalists complained that the introduction of these new crops will lead to the overuse of the two herbicides. This claim is at best unproven. Farmers certainly must pay attention to the development of herbicide resistance in weeds, but the answer to this problem is the advent of new technologies that keep us one step ahead of weed adaptations. 

In other words, these new crops are part of the solution—and keeping safe products away from farmers just makes it harder for us to grow the food our country needs. 

Farmers rely on effective methods of crop protection, including weed control. With them, we can grow more food on less land—and thereby reduce the pressure to convert wilderness into farmland. Environmentalists ought to join farmers in search of new conservation technologies, not oppose us in their safe implementation.

Of greater concern to me is the fact that the Center for Food Safety had threatened to sue the USDA if it didn’t perform an environmental impact study on its own initiative.  These traits had already been under review by USDA for 3 years with no evidence of potential harm to humans or the environment.  Using litigation to slow down or ban a safe product should concern all of us!

Farmers lose either way.  The USDA’s bad decision means that these new crops won’t go on the market and be available to me and other farmers next year, as previously planned. Now we’ll have to wait until 2015 at the soonest. This postponement may not sound like much, but it contributes to a disturbing trend. In the United States, it’s becoming harder and harder to introduce new agricultural technologies.   

America has led the world in boosting crop yields. Food is safer, more abundant, and more affordable than ever before. Rather than cheering on our ingenuity, however, bureaucrats increasingly want to hold it back.

We’re watching a major slowdown in new crop approvals. We’ve gone from leading to it now taking the United States three times as long as Argentina and Brazil to approve a new technology. The U.S. is going backwards while Brazil and Argentina are moving forward by effectively using internationally agreed upon science-based regulations.  Innovation in agriculture technology has always has been one of the American farmer’s great advantages over his food-producing competitors. Now we’re handing it away, and for no good reason. 

We need to return to sensible, science-based regulations—not shifting sands and unpredictable decrees from bureaucrats.

Europe already has traveled far down this fateful path. Its embrace of the "precautionary principle" has made it all but impossible to approve agricultural innovations, stifling the continent’s biotech industry. European farmers envy Americans, who can plant genetically modified crops. USDA’s decision on herbicide-resistant plants suggests that they may not be so envious in the future. 

Earlier this year, the British writer Samuel Gregg published "Becoming Europe," a book on economic and cultural trends in the United States. He urged Americans to reject Europeanization and embrace their freedom-loving heritage. He also quotes Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century Frenchman who studied our country: "The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults."

So here’s a message for USDA’s bureaucrats: Waste no time in repairing your crop-protection fault. 

Tim Burrack raises corn, soybeans and pork on a NE Iowa family farm.  He serves as Vice-Chairman and volunteers as a Board Member of Truth About Trade and Technology (www.truthabouttrade.org). Follow us: @TruthAboutTrade on Twitter | Truth About Trade & Technology on Facebook.