AFTERWORD

AFTERWORD

In September 2006, the WTO published part of its ruling on the case brought to court in May 2003 by US President George W. Bush, alleging a de facto European Union moratorium on GMO. The WTO judges noted that as the European Commission had in the meantime changed its procedures to approve a number of different GMO varieties for commercial use that a moratorium or official prohibition no longer existed. Unfortunately, that was true.!

A Preliminary Ruling in the case had been issued by a special three-man tribunal of the World Trade Organization. The WTO decision threatened to open the world's most important region for agricultural production-the European Union-to the forced introduction of genetically-manipulated plants and food products.

The WTO case had been filed by the Government of the United States, together with Canada and Argentina-three of the world's most GMO-contaminated nations.

A WTO three-judge panel, chaired by Christian Haberli, a Swiss Agriculture Ministry bureaucrat, ruled preliminarily that the EU had applied a "de facto" moratorium on approvals of GMO products between June 1999 and August 2003, contradicting Brussels's claim