|
|
|
|
CIAO DATE: 05/01
Trade and Environment After Seattle
Duncan Brack
April 2000
The interrelationship between international trade and environmental protection is becoming increasingly important — and controversial. The volume of world trade in goods topped $5 trillion for the first time in 1996, having grown at an average rate of about 8% a year since the signing of the Marrakesh agreement in 1994 which marked the completion of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations. The set of agreements administered by the World Trade Organization (WTO), centred around the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and covering areas such as agriculture, textiles, services, intellectual property, technical barriers to trade and health standards, represents a significant extension in scope compared with its pre-Uruguay Round version. In turn this means that international trade regulation increasingly impinges on other areas of public policy.
At the same time, the impact of human activities on the environment continues to grow. In terms of the degradation of land and water quality, the pollution of the local and global atmosphere, and the depletion of natural resources, most of the current trends reveal worsening environmental problems, suggesting that national and international environmental goals will not be met without extensive policy reform and significant changes in practices and strategies. At the same time, however, the network of international environmental regulation is devel-oping rapidly. As well as the framework offered by Agenda 21, the programme for action aimed at achieving sustainable devel-opment in the 21st century signed at the 1992 'Earth Summit', the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), almost 200 multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) now exist or are under negotiation, covering a wide variety of polluting or otherwise unsustainable behaviour.
Since trade and environmental policies both affect the use of natural resources, it is hardly surprising that the two interact. In theory, the objectives of trade liberalization and environ-mental protection should be entirely compatible. Both have as their aim the optimization of efficiency in the use of resources, whether from the perspective of maximizing the gains from the comparative advantages of nations, through trade, or of ensur-ing that economic development becomes environmentally sustainable. Indeed, each of the UNCED and Uruguay Round agreements claims to be in accordance with the other. Agenda 21 states that: 'An open, multilateral trading system, supported by the adoption of sound environmental policies, would have a positive impact on the environment and contribute to sustain-able development'. The WTO agreement recognizes that trade should be conducted '... while allowing for the optimal use of the world's resources in accordance with the objective of sustainable development, seeking both to protect and preserve the environment and to enhance the means for doing so ...'.
The founding conference of the WTO agreed a work programme for a new Committee on Trade and Environment (CTE), designed to 'identify the relationship between trade measures and environmental measures, in order to promote sustainable development [and] to make appropriate recom-mendations on whether any modifications of the provisions of the multilateral trading system are required ...'. The CTE has proved unable, however, to agree any such recommenda-tions, and after a protracted but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to do so in 1995-6, has settled for playing a primarily analytical role. A number of proposals for modifying the WTO system for environmental ends surfaced during the run-up to the third WTO ministerial, in Seattle in late 1999, but — along with the rest of the agenda — failed to make any progress. This briefing paper looks at the key issues and controversies in the trade-environment debate after Seattle.
Full Text of Briefing Paper No. 13 (PDF, 6 pgs, 56 Kb)
Email this citation