US trade officials say that the EU's proposed new rules for the labeling and traceability of genetically modified (GM) crops and foods will not be enough to resolve a complaint the United States currently has before the World Trade Organization (WTO). The rules, approved by a vote of the European Parliament last week, require special labeling of food with more than 0.9% GM content, or which involved GM crops in its production, and the meticulous tracing of GM products from the field to the consumer.

The vote was intended to clear the path to removing the EU's de facto moratorium on new GM approvals, in place since 1998. This moratorium arose when some member states of the European Union blocked new approvals because of fears about safety and consumers' right to know if GM crops were present in foods or had been used in their production. This has been interpreted by the United States and some other countries as unfair blocking of the free movement of safe products and led to the complaint to the WTO, a first decision on which is expected later this year.

Richard Mills, of the US Trade Representative's office, said that the new rules would not be sufficient for the WTO complaint to be resolved. In a statement released after the vote, he said the new labeling requirements should be nonprejudicial and feasible. "We are concerned that the proposed traceability and labeling does not meet this standard," he said.

The US position may have been weakened by the adoption by the United Nations, at a meeting that ended on July 7, of new standards on GM crops. These standards are widely used as the legal basis for resolving trade disputes. They provide detailed procedures for determining if GM foods are safe and also endorse the concept of traceability, which is central to the European proposals.

David Bowe of the European Parliament's Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy does not see much hope for things changing to suit US demands. He told The Scientist that the new proposal is "the best we can get in terms of a balanced piece of legislation, and it will give the consumer choice if we can make it work."

"There will be some member states who wish to persist with the moratorium," Bowe said. "I am sure there are going to be a lot of disputes." He pointed out that the real test will only come when the appropriate Regulatory Committees meet to consider new applications, something that is not likely until the fall.

Simon Barber of EuropaBio, the European Association for Bioindustries, believes the new rules meet the demands of the member states that have been blocking new approvals. "We now see no reason for the continued moratorium," he told The Scientist.

The reaction of the US biotech and agriculture community has been overwhelmingly negative. "The new traceability and labeling standards are impractical," Val Giddings, of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, based in Washington, D.C,. said in a statement. "We fear the result [of the rules] would be to replace an overt moratorium with a technical barrier to trade that would be no less indefensible."

Bob Stallman, President of the American Farm Bureau Federation, said in a statement: "The EU has only made a bad situation worse. It's commercially impossible to comply with the rule, it's not justified by any scientific analysis, and it's just as WTO inconsistent as the biotech ban that the EU says it will replace."

European anti-GM pressure groups are taking some comfort from the new EU rules but are far from satisfied. Friends of the Earth Europe (FoEE) would have preferred a threshold of 0.1% rather than 0.9%, in order to make it as strict as current testing techniques allow.

But they gave the rules a general welcome. "This new legislation is a welcome step in the right direction and will allow countries to take action to protect our food and farming from genetic pollution," Geert Ritsema, FoEE's GMO campaign coordinator, said in a statement. "It will also give consumers and farmers more information so that they can choose whether or not to take part in the biotech industry's massive GM experiment."