The battleground between Europe and the United States is suddenly changed by last week's vote in the European Parliament to tighten regulations on genetically-modified food.
It will see growth restrictions to protect conventional and organic crops and yet lift a de facto five-year ban on GM crop approvals. Compulsory labelling will apply to thousands of extra food items derived from GM soya and maize which up to now were excluded because they do not contain GM DNA. Within the EU context, the new regime was aptly described by EU Commissioner Mr David Byrne as giving consumers a genuine choice between GM and non-GM products.
The changes will probably do little to reduce the likelihood of confrontation between the US and Europe with the World Trade Organisation as arbiter. Transatlantic tension on the GM issue has never eased since the US came to the forefront of plant biotechnology, and recent events suggest it will leave a bad aftertaste long after differences over the war in Iraq have been patched up.
The Bush administration has, predictably, denounced the EU's latest attempt at revising its position, which in many respects has been arbitrary and motivated by political divisions among member-states. The US insists that requiring labelling of GM foods is unworkable and unenforceable. More pertinently, perhaps, the regulations will not suit their production systems. Labelling and traceability regulations will require producers, grain-handlers, processors and retailers to separate GM crops, which will place considerable demands and costs on the US food industry - the world's largest GM crop producer.
EU member-governments have to approve the new regime, but a lifting of the unofficial ban on new GM crops seems inevitable. It is likely to be followed by a revised US suit to the one initiated last month; probably a precursor to a transatlantic trade war unprecedented in its economic ferocity. Europe has a cultural anxiety when it comes to GM food. It sometimes manifests itself in concerns with little scientific basis.
Delays by biotech companies in bringing into mainstream production new generation GM foods of tangible benefits to consumers - such as "fat-lowering" crops and those that overcome vitamin deficiencies - has compounded US difficulties. Moralising to Europe with questionable claims on the effect of its GM policies in poorer countries, when the issue has always been fraught with difficulty among individual member-states, is unlikely to smooth the way for US access to the rest of the world for its GM products, and to its most important target market, Europe.