EU faces uphill struggle to ‘green’ global trade

Date: 16/09/1999

By Simon Coss

IF RECENT declarations by leaders of some of the world's richest countries are to be believed, the planet will be a much greener place after the Millennium Round trade negotiations.

In recent months, EU and US politicians have stressed that the talks must produce a clear set of rules on the relationship between free trade and environmental protection.

In its July report on The EU Approach to the Millennium Round, the European Commission called on EU governments to hammer home the 'green trade' message at all stages of the forthcoming negotiations to achieve “an overall outcome where environmentally friendly consequences can be identified in relevant parts of the package”.

At the last G8 meeting in June, leaders of the world's seven richest nations - the US, Japan, Germany, France, Canada, the UK and Italy - plus Russia, all agreed that the talks should examine the impact of global trade on the environment.

Supporters of this approach insist that all new rules should be based on the principle of 'sustainable development'; ie ensuring that any economic or industrial advances do not further sap dwindling natural resources.

But not everyone is convinced that adding a set of tough new standards to the WTO's rule book is a good idea.

Many developing countries argue that this would set in stone the present balance of economic power between the world's richer and poorer nations. They claim that trading giants such as the EU and US only reached their present positions in the global economic pecking order by going through an extremely dirty phase of industrialisation.

One Indian diplomat pointed out that if these countries were really interested in cleaning up the global environment, they would help their poorer neighbours to shut down dirty factories by sharing new 'green' technologies. “The West very jealously guards the technology and standards it has developed. What we need are some sorts of financial mechanisms to help us adopt clean technologies,” he argued.

In addition, while declaring their commitment to toughening up the rules on environmental protection, both Washington and the EU have made it clear that they will not sign up to any deal which could be used to introduce greater restrictions on trade.