The U.S. trading relationship with Europe and the UK has been complicated, partly because it is hard for Americans to fully understand the way Europeans think about food and agriculture.
Philip Seng, who worked many years for the U.S. Meat Export Federation, told WLJ that, in order to understand where we are today with the UK and Brexit, we must also look at the historical environment we’re dealing with in Europe, because the UK have been a part of the EU since 1957.
“That’s when the European Economic Community (EEC) was formed, initially as an economic community,” explained Seng.
“At first everything was totally economic, involving their coal and steel lobbies right after the war. The goal was to help Europeans prosper and restore their industry and agriculture and recover after World War II.
“Since the inception of the EU, the largest budget they had—more than their budget for defense or anything else—was for agriculture. Back in the 1980s almost 70 percent of the entire European budget was devoted to agriculture. They take their agriculture extremely seriously.”
That’s not to say Americans don’t, he added. “But in contrast, the European producers and consumers have a reverence for agriculture and its beauty and pristine nature. It’s held in a different regard.”
They value it highly because they know what it means to have gone hungry after World War II, he summarized.
“Additionally, their common agricultural policy (CAP) goes beyond ag policy and addresses societal issues. Its purpose is to keep populations in rural areas, so they don’t overrun the cities. Its geographic indicators were spawned by their deep regard for agriculture.
“Most importantly, their CAP is blatantly protectionist,” he explained.
The Europeans also have a more cautious attitude regarding science and technology than Americans do, partly because of what happened in 1986 with the Chernobyl disaster. This was the catastrophic nuclear accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near the now-abandoned town of Pripyat, in the northern Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Union, 65 miles north of Kiev.
“Prior to that time the Europeans had embraced science. History illustrates that every country that embraced science has done well and prospered. This is the reason Japan did so well after the war; they immediately looked at the newest technologies and regarded them as positive rather than negative.
“Europeans were the same way initially, but when Chernobyl exploded it had only been about 40 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki; there were many people who still remembered that devastation and nuclear phobia. This ushered in tremendous doubt; people felt that science and technology had failed them,” explained Seng.
“The impact this had on the Europeans was immense. In northern Europe, from France north—all through Germany, Belgium and Scandinavia—radiation was at such a high level that they couldn’t eat food from their gardens and they also had to destroy livestock—almost all their beef, pork and poultry—because the grass had become radioactive. It was a tremendous scare that fostered precautionary principles. They couldn’t trust that food was safe; it had to be proven that it was safe.”
This spawned the belief that they could not trust science and scientists and made them more cautious about food safety.
“Americans today embrace science and have more trust in it. In contrast, a more cautious attitude became embedded in the European psyche; Chernobyl was their Nagasaki. The Ukraine wasn’t that far away and it had a dramatic impact on northern Europe. After that, the Green Week in Berlin became very vogue,” Seng said.
This is a major international trade fair held annually in Germany for processors and marketers in agriculture, horticulture, and various food industries. Green Week is accompanied every year by protests and demonstrations against industrial livestock production, and for more sustainable farming.
“Precautionary principles became the overriding mindset. European philosophy was first to ban everything, especially imported products, until proven safe. This is in contrast to American ideas of science where we embrace new things if they are approved by the FDA. Europeans did not share this attitude; their systems had failed,” said Seng.
Then in 1989 our beef market in Europe was closed, due to the hormone ban.
“That ban has since been successfully challenged twice (we took it to the World Trade Organization Dispute Settlement Body, and we won, in both cases), but all of this emanates from the cautious, protective attitude spawned by the Chernobyl disaster. This protectionism has become one of their biggest excuses for not moving forward when it comes to food safety, in our opinion,” Seng explained.
He also pointed out we’ve now gone through more than six decades of dealing with the EU as a community and the UK has been a part of this.
“The UK has totally embraced the European philosophy of food and protectionism. This is something we will have to address as we enter into new trade negotiations with the UK,” he said. This is part of the background that we need to understand going forward.
“Some people think the UK is not being scientific or doesn’t understand science. They do understand science, but they are coming at it from a different perspective. To be successful trading with Europe or with the UK we must take this into consideration.” — Heather Smith Thomas, WLJ correspondent
