The three-person WTO panel was asked to rule not on whether GMOs were safe, but whether the EU’s lengthy and stringent approval process met EU and WTO rules that products be tested without “undue delay”.

The US, whose farmers use GMOs extensively, says GMO products have been languishing in the approval process since 1998. This, they say, acts as a form of backdoor protectionism against farm exports from the US and other countries that use GMOs a lot.

The ruling has upset groups like Friends of the Earth - but is worth noting that the ruling was, on the whole, against EU policies before August 2003, when the complaint was filed, because the EU modified its policies at that point. As Peter Mandelson put it : "This interim report is largely of historical interest, as this panel will not alter the system or framework within which the EU takes decisions on GMOs.”

Calestous Juma, professor of international development at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, says that Europe policy-makers’ attitudes towards GM food is just the latest in a line of attempts to demonise products that hurt European producers:

Take coffee: in the 1500s Catholic bishops demonised coffee as “Satan’s drink” and urged a ban. It was competing with wine. In its defence, Pope Clement VIII proclaimed: “Why, this ‘Satan’s drink’ is so delicious it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it. We shall fool Satan by baptising it and making it a truly Christian beverage.” More than a century later, coffee was pitted against tea as the incumbent English drink. To defeat the competition, King Charles II decreed the banning of coffeehouses in 1675 only to revoke the decision two days before it came into effect.

In Germany, coffee was outlawed or its sale severely restricted for economic reasons. “It is disgusting to notice the increase in the quantity of coffee used by my subjects, and the like amount of money that goes out of the country in consequence. My people must drink beer. His Majesty was brought up on beer, and so were his ancestors,” declared Frederick the Great in 1777.