Roquefort vs. Hormone-fed beef: disagreement on sanitary regulations or commercial war?

In retaliation to the European Union’s refusal to let American hormone-fed beef be imported, the US Trade Department announced on Thursday 15 January a three-fold increase of import taxes on Roquefort, bringing these up to 300%. Although the American market is rather small (the United States import 2% of French Roquefort production, i.e. 400 tons per year), the famous French cheese is a symbol of the disagreement on sanitary regulation which opposes the New World to the Old one.

Whereas the European Union has long outlawed the usage of any sort of hormones by member-country stock breeders, the United States looks upon unpasteurized milk-based products suspiciously. It’s in this state of mind that neither one seems to be able to reach an agreement on the issue of the battle against bacterial development on poultry, on the usage of growth-stimulating hormones or on the banalisation of GMO’s.

Sanitary regulations or commercial war? Whatever, since the first time hormone-fed beef was forbidden in 1999, the United States and Canada every year force Europe to pay a penalty amounting to some hundred million Euros in the form of taxes.

In this context the Bush administration’s recent decision on Roquefort is one more measure in favour of protectionism, which goes against the measures recommended in particular by the G20. It pretty much looks like food security constraints dominate « anti-crisis » measures. For, if custom barriers are progressively falling, today it is the sanitary barriers which are getting higher and higher.