Reuters
CANBERRA - WTO chief Mike Moore said on Tuesday governments were discussing ways of ensuring an EU plan for isolating mad cow disease did not become a new form of protectionism.
The European Union's mad cow crisis had made it essential for food safety and related issues to be built in to any future trade deal, the EU said on Monday in presenting its trade negotiating position at the World Trade Organization headquarters in Geneva.
"The issue of food safety is a huge issue in Europe," Moore said in Canberra during a visit to Australia.
"Ministers are talking about this, about how you do something here without creating an opportunity for a new form of protectionism," he added in comments to reporters.
Britain's mad cow scare has swept through the rest of Europe as bovine spongiform encephalopathy is increasingly identified in continental cattle. Experts say it could also affect the rest of the world because of industrial foodstock and cattle exports.
Moore was in Australia as part of a world tour ahead of the next round of world trade talks, due to take place in Qatar in November.
The last round of talks floundered in Seattle in late 1999 as the United States and the EU clashed over farm trade and farming subsidies, and as developing nations fought off attempts to get minimum labor standards on the agenda.
The United States has rejected the EU proposal on food safety as a poorly disguised attempt to maintain trade-distorting subsidies, which Washington wants outlawed.:
