Obama to get his first taste of the "Roquefort war" (News Feature)

By Siegfried Mortkowitz Jan 22, 2009, 10:17 GMT

Paris - Among the many gifts Barack Obama received this week to celebrate his inauguration as the 44th president of the United States was a deluxe presentation box of French Roquefort cheese.

Little is known about Obama's cheese preferences, but it can be assumed that he will probably not be able to enjoy this Roquefort fully, because it will taste more than a little of international politics.

The cheese was a present from the president of the Roquefort-producing region of Midi-Pyrenees, Martin Malvy, to remind him that his predecessor, George W Bush, had reignited an old US-EU trade conflict just days before leaving office.

On January 15, five days before Obama's inauguration, the Bush administration tripled the customs duty on Roquefort, as a retaliation for Europe's ban on the import of US-bred hormone-fed beef.

'The inauguration of Barack Obama holds out a lot of hope, especially for better relations between the United States and Europe,' Malvy said.

'So I sent this prestige product of Midi-Pyreneean agriculture to President Barack Obama to ask him if, beginning Tuesday, the new US administration could look again at the affair, but with more intelligence.'

Although a number of other European agro-products were also slapped with retaliatory tariffs by Washington, Roquefort was the only one where the custom duties were tripled.

This will turn the cheese into a luxury product in the United States, on a par with products by Hermes or Louis Vuitton, when the tariffs go into effect on March 23, and effectively kill the United States as a viable market for the world's best-known blue cheese.

The United States imports about 400 tons of Roquefort per year, or about 2 per cent of the total annual production of the cheese.

'Roquefort is a French symbol and we are paying for its fame,' complained Beatrice Weirich, spokeswoman for a regional agricultural trade union.

In fact, Roquefort and Washington share a rather checkered past. In 1998, the administration of then-president Bill Clinton imposed a 100 per cent tariff on the cheese to retaliate against the beef ban.

That resulted in fierce protests in France, and the by now legendary dismantling of a McDonald's outlet in the southern city of Millau by a group of 10 protesters led by anti-globalization activist Jose Bove, at the time the head of a local Roquefort producers association.

On Wednesday, Bove was part of a delegation that delivered 7 kilos of Roquefort to the US Embassy in Paris, as a protest against the cheese being 'taken hostage' in the trade war.

But France and the European Union are not stopping at symbolic gestures. Brussels and Paris have decided to file an appeal at the World Trade Organization (WTO) against the tariffs.

Whatever the result of that procedure, which could take as long as one year, Europe is determined not to budge from its stand against the importation of hormone-raised beef.

'This measure... will not make us diverge one centimetre from the position we have chosen with the other Euopean countries,' French Agriculture Minister Michel Barnier said.

Bon appetit, President Obama.