The beef-hormone conflict has established itself as the mother of all food safety trade disputes. In the 1970s European consumers began to be alarmed over the health effects of the use of hormones in livestock production. A ban on the use of certain growth hormones in livestock rearing followed in the 1980s, and this ban was eventually extended to include imports of meat from animals that had been given hormones. Protests from the US and other exporters were to no avail. By the 1990s the issue became a test case for the new Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement of the World Trade Organization (WTO), and eventually a test (in the eyes of many) of the willingness of the European Union to abide by an adverse ruling under the strengthened legal architecture of the Dispute Settlement Mechanism of the WTO. The amount of trade originally involved was only about $100 million, a small fraction of the billions of dollars of trade which flow across the Atlantic in each direction. Even compared to agricultural trade flows the sum is very small. But the conflict over hormone-treated beef has had a major impact on trade relations far beyond the confines of the beef sector.