wild places | wild happenings | wild news
make a difference for our wild places

home | links | search the site
  all articles latest | past | articles by topics | search wildnews
wild news on wildsingapore
  IUCN (PDF file) 21 Dec 05
Negotiating Nature at the WTO (Part 4) What kind of deal for people and nature?

After five days in Hong Kong, ministers attending the WTO meeting agreed on their declaration.

Painful negotiations resulted in grudging consensus for modest steps to liberalize trade in agriculture, fisheries, industrial goods and services.

But what does it all mean for the fate of the planet? IUCN’s Senior Advisor for Economics and Environment reflects on the outcome.

The recently concluded WTO meeting in Hong Kong was an amazing piece of public theatre, combining secretive, late-night negotiations, bland statements in plenary sessions, crude accusations and posturing at interim press conferences, a mixture of sober and wild analysis in NGO side events, all of it punctuated by violent clashes between protesters and police on the streets outside.

While the talks did not collapse, as some had feared following the failure of a previous ministerial meeting in Cancun in 2003, the results of the Hong Kong conference will be a disappointment to many, perhaps most commentators, notwithstanding the positive spin that ministers put on the outcome in their final statements and press briefings.

Hopes of major concessions by developed countries on agricultural subsidies and market access, in favor of the developing world, have not been fulfilled. While some progress has been made, the developed countries gave less ground, and demanded more in return, than might have been expected from the high-minded promises made when the Doha Development Round was launched in 2001.

By the same token, many developing countries – some of which are major trading powers in their own right – clung tenaciously to their special trade preferences, safeguards and exceptions, in order to avoid opening their own markets further or maintain artificial advantages over other developing countries.

Mercantilist thinking – i.e. the false notion that if you win I must lose – continues to determine how trade rules are written.

The eventual result of the proposed changes, in what is a fiendishly complex system of trade law, remains virtually impossible to predict.

As always with trade policy, the devil is in the detail. While some likely winners and losers can be identified immediately, the ultimate impacts of the Doha Round on global poverty will take years to manifest. Moreover, any result of this agreement will probably be swamped by the impact of economic forces even mightier than the WTO.

From a conservation perspective the outcome of the meeting in Hong Kong is somewhat clearer, with very few bright spots and many more dark clouds on the horizon.

The good news, if such small steps can be called that, is as follows:

• An agreement was reached in principle to prohibit fisheries subsidies which contribute to over-fishing; and
• A specific deadline (31 July 2006) was set for clarifying the relation between the TRIPS Agreement and the CBD, in particular with respect to developing country concerns over access and benefit sharing for genetic resources.

In addition, there was a general reaffirmation of the need to enhance the mutual supportiveness of trade and environmental agreements, and to remove barriers to trade in environmental goods and services, although no concrete steps or deadlines were agreed in these areas.

So much for environmental victories in Hong Kong.

On the other side of the ledger, most environmentalists will regret the emphasis in the final text on continued liberalization and expansion of trade across a range of sectors, with little or no attention to pollution or resource constraints.

In agriculture, industrial goods and services, the Hong Kong text simply opens the floodgates a little more to continued unsustainable production and consumption.

Members seem to have forgotten the strong language in the very first paragraph of the founding document of the WTO on the need “to protect and preserve the environment” (see: Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization, ref. LT/UR/A/2 dated 15 April 1994).

In the absence of more holistic thinking by trade ministers, or stronger checks and balances from other parts of the multilateral system, the WTO and most of its members seem poised to continue ignoring the environmental costs of economic growth and the widespread erosion of critical ecosystem services.

Some day they will have to face reality. Until that day, the WTO cannot be said to live up to its founders’ vision of truly sustainable development.

The meeting in Hong Kong may have saved the WTO, but it did little to help save the planet.

For more information, contact Joshua Bishop at joshua.bishop@iucn.org
links
Related articles on Global issues: general
about the site | email ria
  News articles are reproduced for non-profit educational purposes.
 

website©ria tan 2003 www.wildsingapore.com