Farm Progress | Ed Maixner | 1/16/2002
American crop producers and food manufacturers remain surprised and somewhat bewildered over the import regulations issued in China late last week for genetically modified products.
A preliminary assessment shows two new sets of hurdles for all products involving production or processing with GM products. Such products must first gain certification that they are not harmful to human or animal health or the environment. Then, they must be labeled in one of three formats as a GM product, processed with GM material, or, possibly containing GM products at undetectable levels.
Issued in Mandarin, the regulations are a further development of preliminary rules the Beijing government issued last June. American food sector representatives and farm commodity organizations are scrambling to understand English translations but say there still may be more they don't understand than understand in the new mandates.
One analyst for American food manufacturers says the regulations seem to set a higher bar than does the European Union's GM labeling rules. Up to now, the EU's requirements have been the world's most restrictive.
The analyst says China's requirement that products must be labeled for even undetectable levels of GM material suggests a paper trail may be required to track the origin of products that may contain only incidental traces of such material. She notes the regulations allow for no "de minimus", or exempted, level of GM material.
Ron Gaskill, biotechnology and trade analyst for the American Farm Bureau Federation, says the apparently high hurdles are worrisome on first reading. "It is cause for concern. We've got to be vigilant on this one," he says.
Perhaps most concerned among U.S. producers are soybean growers and exporters. With 210 million bushels of exports to China last year, they enjoyed nearly a 50% share of that import market.
Gil Griffis, who heads the Asia division for the American Soybean Association, says his first review of the regulations has ASA "very concerned." Two-thirds of U.S. soybeans are from countless biotech varieties that would be subject to the GM regulations, he says, and any unnecessary barriers to export sales to China would immediately threaten the U.S. market share in that country.
Griffis says exporters will be asking a lot of questions of the U.S. trade representative to learn just how the regulations will be implemented.
For example, he says, it's not clear how soybeans would be certified to the Chinese government as safe to people, animals, and the environment. He says, for example, so many biotech varieties are grown in the U.S., and then mixed in the market pipeline, that it would be both "extraordinarily expensive" and probably impossible for the Agriculture Department to certify each variety or each shipment separately.
Of major concern to both commodity exporters and food manufacturers is the March 20 implementation date. Griffis points out that last year Chinese officials agreed they would not enforce the labeling regulations until U.S. exporters have an opportunity to read and understand them, gain clarification from Beijing through U.S. trade offices, and so forth. That apparently cannot be accomplished in the two months now proclaimed as the effective date, he says.
The food manufacturers' analyst says, if the new requirements are as tough as they now appear, food makers will be scrambling to reconstitute their products and change labels in the weeks ahead to comply with the upcoming deadline. In addition, she notes the regulations state an intent to add to the appendices further products requiring biotech labeling. "The list will grow exponentially," she expects.Farm Progress:
