SHOULD protecting an endangered turtle be illegal? Yes, if it impedes one country鈥檚 attempts to sell goods to another, says the World Trade Organization. Back in the mid-1990s, the US banned an import trade in shrimps from Thailand, Pakistan, Malaysia and the Philippines worth an annual $2.5 billion because fishermen in these countries used nets that captured up to 20 000 endangered Olive Ridley turtles a year. Last October, the four countries went to the WTO court and won their case. The court did not support the US government鈥檚 argument that it was merely upholding international treaties on endangered species.
It would be a mistake to think US officials are always the good guys, though. Last July, Isi Siddiqui, a senior trade official in the US government, said that Japanese plans to identify supermarket foods containing genetically modified material would breach the WTO鈥檚 rules on free trade. 鈥淥bligatory GM labelling suggests a health risk where there is none,鈥� he said. 鈥淚 fear major trade disruptions.鈥�
Economic efficiency
According to the WTO, it鈥檚 usually illegal to discriminate between identical products on the basis of how they are produced, whether it involves turtle-killing or genetic modification. The shrimps precedent suggests that it may soon prove illegal to ban fur coats made from animals caught using leg-iron traps, or timber clear-felled from the swamps of Borneo. It may even be illegal to label a 鈥渇air trade鈥� packet of coffee.
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Not surprisingly, green groups are up in arms. In Seattle, the hitherto shadowy WTO hit the headlines with a vengeance. Founded in 1995, it has more than 130 member nations committed to freeing up world trade. It will launch a 鈥淢illennium Round鈥� of negotiations to advance free trade around the globe. Environment groups and aid lobbyists will protest against its growing powers. For them, the WTO is becoming the cuckoo in the nest of international treaties, growing ever larger and turfing out its smaller siblings.
The WTO recently came close to recognising this viewpoint. In its Trade and Environment Report published last month, the WTO acknowledged that 鈥渋ndustries often appeal to competitiveness concerns when lobbying against environmental regulations, and on occasion with some success.鈥� And it accepted a second charge that it had induced a 鈥渞egulatory chill鈥� over some international environmental negotiations.
Negotiations on the Biosafety Protocol to control trade in genetically modified organisms and products broke down earlier this year when the US said the proposed deal, backed by the European Union, would contravene WTO rules. A similar paralysis has hit talks on banning known pollutants such as DDT and PCBs and on encouraging developing countries to protect their rainforests by guaranteeing them rights of the animal and plant resources they contain. The World Wide Fund for Nature fears it could yet undermine controls on trade in endangered species and shipments of hazardous waste.
The WTO is understandably sheepish. The preamble to its charter requires it to promote environmentally responsible trade. And article 20 of its charter says the WTO can exempt conservation laws from its anti-protection rules. But critics say it has never done so. According to Charlie Arden-Clarke, trade campaigner at the World Wide Fund for Nature, 鈥淚f article 20 cannot protect endangered and internationally protected turtles, what can it protect? Under what circumstances will the WTO give priority to the protection of the environment over market deregulation?鈥� However, a WTO spokesman told 麻豆传媒: 鈥淢arket forces cannot be entrusted to solve all problems themselves.鈥� He said the organisation backed improved international cooperation on environmental issues.
The next test for environmentalists could be the timber trade. Over the past five years, the WWF and some other environmental groups have developed an internationally acknowledged system of green labelling for timber taken from forests managed to protect the environment and forest animals. But, under plans discussed by the timber trade and the WTO earlier this year, certificates from the Forest Stewardship Council could be challenged at the WTO as a 鈥渢echnical barrier to trade鈥�.
But proponents of the WTO argue that free trade is the environment鈥檚 friend; that it banishes the subsidies propping up dinosaur industries that pollute the air and wreck farm soils, that deplete fish stocks and pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Look at China, they say. The world鈥檚 most populous country has slashed coal subsidies by more than half in the past decade. The result is an economy that is growing by between 7 and 10 per cent a year-but is creating less pollution. It is probably no coincidence that China鈥檚 growing interest in economic efficiency has enabled it to sign a free trade deal with the US this month and apply for membership of the WTO.
More fundamentally, these proponents believe that economic efficiency is indistinguishable from environmental efficiency. The WTO鈥檚 new director-general, Mike Moore, says: 鈥淧overty is the real enemy of the environment.鈥� Banish poverty and protectionism, the argument goes, and people will have the wealth, incentives and technical know-how to clean up their environments. But cynics note that industrial might and a love of laissez-faire economics has not stopped the US being the world鈥檚 largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
Some environmental campaigners even envisage the organisation as the vanguard of big business鈥檚 move to world domination-and the abasement of environmental standards. The talk is all of a 鈥渕obilisation against globalisation鈥�. Others are less hostile to free trade and recognise that globalisation could speed green technologies round the world. But green economist Paul Ekins of UK-based Forum for the Future says: 鈥淚n its current form, globalisation is increasing inequalities within and between nations.鈥� People like Ekins fear globalisation will mainly benefit Western-based multinationals that lack allegiance or commitment to local communities. The result, they say, is that employment and consumer rights will thrive-and the environment will suffer.
But it shouldn鈥檛 be overlooked that some of the most serious tension occurs between groups opposed to the WTO. While most Western environmentalists backed the US in defence of the turtle, Asian groups accused them of complicity with the US in bullying Third World fishermen. 鈥淲estern environmentalists must recognise that there are fundamental flaws in using trade as a tool for controlling environmental misbehaviour,鈥� says Anil Agarwal, director of the Delhi-based Centre for Science and the Environment. 鈥淐ompared to what the US is doing to the world鈥檚 climate, what India and others are doing to the marine turtle is a contemptuously small problem.
鈥淏ut can the nations most likely to be affected by global warming-the Maldives and Bangladesh, for instance-impose trade sanctions on the US and expect it to be effective?鈥�
And almost inevitably, suspicions arise that some WTO decisions arise from vested interests rather than free-market ideology. The WTO invoked science to rule against a EU ban on importing hormone-treated US beef. The EU insists that the ban is a health precaution. But the WTO has accepted the findings of the Codex Alimentarius Commission, a UN advisory body that triggered a crisis in 1995 when it ruled that hormones in US beef were safe. Critics accuse the commission of bias because many of its scientific advisers are paid by the food industry. They see it as the lever that will ensure the spread of GM foods around the world.
The agenda for the Millennium Round has yet to be drawn up. That will happen in Seattle. Both the EU and the US have talked of wanting to push the environment higher up the trade agenda, though without saying exactly how.
Optimists at the WWF hope this signifies the dawn of 鈥渁 healthier path towards world prosperity鈥�. Others fear environmental concerns are taking a back seat, and that the WTO is more a means of speeding globalisation-but globalisation to suit a select few.
