Participating in a U.S.-EU stakeholder event as part of the initiation of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) negotiations, the U.S. Grains Council urged that regulatory harmonization be a top priority in the agricultural sector.

A growing global population of 9 billion people by mid-century will require a doubling of the current level of food production. This will pose enormous food security challenges for consumers – as well as production challenges for producers around the world. Producers must increase productivity and continue to do so on a sustainable basis. Given the many other increasing pressures on land and water resources, agriculture will clearly have to grow more with less. The wider deployment of modern farming practices, including agricultural biotechnology is essential.

Countries must also work together to remove regulatory impediments to the timely review and approval of genetically modified events. The EU regulatory system is increasingly slow and is resulting in an ever increasing backlog of events. It lacks a workable low level presence policy to address events under review but not yet approved, and it requires a redundant risk assessment on stacked events of which the components were previously approved. Thus, the ability to respond to market conditions and opportunities to export U.S. feed grains to the EU continues to be severely constrained and unpredictable at best. Increased trade disruptions reduce U.S. feed grain exports and result in increased costs for our customers.

The Council believes it is important that these regulatory challenges be addressed as an integral part of the T-TIP negotiations. The United States and the European Union, two of the largest global economies, are seeking a systematic approach to expanding trade. Because T-TIP has been conceived as an ambitious, comprehensive, and high-standard trade and investment agreement, negotiators should seek to develop regulatory convergence and harmonization on biotechnology regulations and other sanitary and phytosanitary measures in order to expand trade and enhance global food security.