A promise by the European Commission to lift an 11-year-old ban on US poultry imports has proven too hard to fulfill and it was probably unwise to try, a top EU official said late Friday. "It is a very, very contaminated political area," EU Industry Commissioner Guenter Verheugen said, referring to resistance in European Union member states to importing US poultry sanitised with a low-concentration chlorine wash.
Washington says the treatment is safe and that there is no scientific basis for the EU to block imports. Verheugen is the EU co-chair of the Transatlantic Economic Council (TEC), created in 2007 with the aim of tearing down barriers to trade between the United States and the EU. To get the council off to a good start, both sides presented issues they hoped would be easy to resolve.
Verheugen said he was surprised when the United States put the poultry ban at the top of its list, but after getting the approval of European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and commission members "I said 'yes, we can deliver that'." Now, looking back, "it was not the wisest decision to have that on the agenda," Verheugen said. "I'm absolutely not going to discuss it again," except to brief US official on the status of failed efforts to resolve the spat, he said.