May 20, 1999

Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman says the European Union, insisting on its hormone-treated beef import ban, is placing the entire World Trade Organization process at risk. "We can't accept (WTO responsibilities) when they're convenient and ignore them when they're not," he told the World Meat Congress in Dublin.

The WTO faces "daunting challenges," Glickman said, reconciling "a noisy throng of national interests, political agendas, economic models and cultural traditions…and somehow harmonizing them within a uniform set of rules." When there is a dispute involving the EU, it's all the more difficult, he added, because the EU is "an amalgam of autonomous member states."

By maintaining its ban on beef from hormone-treated cattle, "the EU has put all this at risk," Glickman said. When nations join the WTO, they "temper some national impulses to serve the greater, long-term global good. We can't be selective about our WTO responsibilities. We cannot accept them when they're convenient and ignore them when they're not."

And the United States will "move forward, firmly, in seeing that this ban is lifted…and ensuring that all producers are treated fairly in the global marketplace," he added.

Two different cultural attitudes characterize the dispute, Glickman said. In the United States, "we are more likely to look at science and see a force for agricultural progress." Europe is "generally a little more skeptical, perhaps concerned about even the theoretical possibility of risk" because this is a public health issue, "an issue where nations might choose their own very exacting domestic standard…and balk at a global standard that they consider inconsistent with their own."