**5.1 A rapid historic overview of the last decades**

In the Dillon round of GATT negotiations (1960-62), the EEC12 negotiated zero duties on soybeans and several other agricultural products. At the time, soybean was of little importance in international trade with ca 4 MT traded in 1961. Furthermore, there were no varieties of soy available at this time that could be grown in this EU-6. Thus the EU-6 had no producers to protect and found in their interest to keep borders open to soybeans and their products. At that time, pasturages, cereal and some domestic protein rich crops provided most of the necessary feed. That period was the beginning of a drastic change into the European livestock production.

However, the high European internal costs of feed grains forced livestock producers to substitute cheaper soybean meal. In addition to the competition between European feed grains and imported soybean meal, soybean oil competed with domestic vegetable oils such as sunflower oil, olive oil or rapeseed oil, and, when used in margarine, competes with butter. To compete with cheap soybean oil, local oils were subsidized, which was attacked under GATT in 1987. In 1973, a shortage in US soybean exports impacted most of the current EU-MS, including France which was considered as the least soybean dependent EU-MS (Berlan et al., 1977; Hasha, 2002). As maize and soybean compete for both feeding and surface, this kind of shortage is expected to come back with the growing use of maize for bio-ethanol production (Headey, 2011). Several EU-MS attempted to reduce their growing dependence from soybean by national protein plans – but up to now unsuccessfully.

The European cropping of soybean was, up to 2007, restricted to some EU-MS and aimed at food or a few feed specialties (e.g. organic) with most of the production being based in Italy. Among the several reasons why EU is not a soybean producer we can distinguish a relatively unfavorable climate with cool spring and drought early summer, with a Northern predominance, in the EU compared to third countries producing soybean and a relatively high population density with rather small farms and fields. However, several soy varieties are cultivated in Canada and thus soy cropping in the EU-27 would now be possible after appropriate selection of cultivars, provided the seed companies could find some benefit in that selection. This would be probably the case after GM soybean approval for European cultivation.

The EU was in 2007 still under construction and two new countries coming from the implosion of the former soviet bloc entered the EU-25. At its entrance into the EU, Romania officially stopped cropping GM soybean and came back to old varieties of non-GM soybean whose cropping was also not favored by the current European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP; Badea and Pamfil, 2009; Dinu et al., 2010). However, the interest in GM soybean was declining from 1996 to 2002 (Brookes, 2005).
