Gobar Times (Down To Earth's Supplement) -- Centre for Science and Environment (CSE)

Environmentalists in a fix!

Environment SO: what do you make of this one? Take a good longlook at this photo of protesters dressed as turtles, and consider the following:

Fact No 1: shrimp catching can kill sea turtles
Fact No 2: the sea turtle is endangered
Fact No 3: the US imposed bans on shrimping
Fact No 4: local fisherfolk face extinction

Oh SHUCKS.... we all agree that the killing of turtles is a bad thing. No? But where on EARTH do we ‘environmentalists’ stand in relation to trade rules that will leave poor Indian and Pakistani fisherfolk out of work?

Does the word ‘environment’ just mean animals and plants – or does it mean people as well? Yes! we think it’s a difficult debate, too.

Please write and tell us what YOU think. We’ll print your letters and send them to the WTO.

ROUND 3: ENVIRONMENT

Shrimps, beef or labour, - it’s all to do with the environment

The leading question in the WTO debate is how one treats ‘environmental issues’ in global agreements when matters of environment are so thoroughly specific to local habitat. As with the question of ‘exploited’ cheap and child labour, demanding that developing countries improve their policies and standards of living by conforming to the rules set by industrialised countries, simply doesn’t help. They often haven’t got the money to do so - and anyway, who said that industrialised countries are automatically in the right?

Fundung

In August 1999, ministers from 15 developing countries met in Banglaore, India, to discuss exactly these problems in preparation for the Seattle meeting. They concluded that they could no longer accept international labour and environmental standards set according to a Western agenda, which limit their competitive advantage in the global market (as happened in the shrimp-turtle case).

This is all very well, but it is worrying to think that developing countries will from now on be suspicious of attempts to make trade rulesenvironmentally-friendly.

Perhaps the real problem with the global market is that it encourages human beings to rely on products which are not local to where they live - and so they no longer notice whether the products they buy are sustainable or not. Industrialised society makes it easy for people to become removed from their environment. In Indiawe still live in naturally close proximity to our seasons, habitat, environment. Never forget that. Never let ‘going global’ overtake care of the local. Please?

Free, not fair
Who will referee the referee?

Can we trust the WTO to play fair and square? Or is it controlled by the US, designed in the West, and custom-built to serve the interests of the 7 richest industrialised countries of the world (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain and the US) who between them control about half the global revenue and two-thirds of world trade?
At the moment, the least developed countries of the world represent 20% of the world's population, but they generate only 0.03% of its trade. Will the WTO address this global imbalance?

There are a number of problems, as we have seen, with the way the WTO is run.

Firstly, it is simply not on to demand that all 134 member countries, with their differing levels of wealth, should face exactly the same trade rules - especially given that the settling of disputes via the WTO involves high costs which many can’t afford. Or, to make it fair, developing countries must be actively assisted rather than restricted in their efforts to achieve the same level of development as their richer neighbours. That’s more like it, isn’t it?

Secondly, developing countries being poorer than industrialised ones, do not have the clout to threaten richer countries with a bash they might regret (as we saw with poor old Ecuador and the bananas). Trade negotiations are based on trade offs: America raising sanctions, Europe threatening a ban - a barter system (we told you trade is nothing new). But if you have nothing to barter, how can you do a deal?

The irony of course, is that developing countries have an enormous amount to offer - both in terms of natural resources and manufactured goods – yet they are restricted from offering it!