The United States’ announcement, on 8 October, that it was pursuing its complaint in the World Trade Organisation over the EU ban on chlorinated US chicken surprised no one. The writing was on the wall from January 2009, when Washington asked for WTO consultations, which went badly. The dispute, in a nutshell, is as follows: Europe says US anti-salmonella chemical treatments on poultry are too extreme, that if their poultry was kept cleaner along the production chain, they should not be necessary. Washington counters that there is no scientific evidence that these treatments are a risk to consumers’ health and, moreover, they reduce the risk of salmonella poisoning. About the only thing EU and US officials agree on is that there is still too much salmonella on the chicken on supermarket shelves. The reason more people do not get poisoned is that people tend to cook their chicken before eating it.

The spat illustrates a chronic problem that is hobbling transatlantic efforts to remove barriers to free trade. When it comes to food safety, neither the European nor US governments or publics are willing to move to a mutual recognition regime. In other words, they do not trust in each others’ food production methods and processes, even if the outcome is broadly similar. That is why the Transatlantic Economic Council (TEC), which meets again on 28 October, failed its first major test after the US put the dispute on the agenda. And that is why the TEC, set up in 2007 to tackle precisely such issues, will struggle to resolve disputes in a range of other food sectors, from hormone-treated beef to genetically modified foods, as Europolitics outlined in its June 2009 edition of Insight(see 3781).