page 12

issue 103
  

 

sabotaging the environment

wto pits eco-agreements against corporate interests

biosafety protocol under threat from wto

 

Another environmental agreement that is the fruit of more than ten years of negotiations and campaigning is the Cartagena Biosafety Protocol, which comes into force in September 2003. The Biosafety Protocol seeks to protect biological diversity from the potential risks posed by genetically modified organisms, and allows countries to ban or restrict the import and use of GMOs.

Based on the precautionary principle (see next page), the Biosafety Protocol is bound to be contentious for business interests. Throughout the negotiations, continuous pressure by the United States resulted in conflicting wording over the relationship between the treaty and the WTO being inserted. While stating that the Protocol should not comprise rights and obligations under existing agreements, the text also says that this “is not intended to subordinate this protocol to other international agreements.”

With the Biosafety Protocol entering into force, there is widespread speculation that signatories could be challenged in the WTO over the use of relevant trade measures at the national level. The US has already filed a complaint against the EU’s moratorium on GMOs (see page 8), but this could be just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to challenges to countries attempting to set environmental and social policies that interfere with corporate interests.

bringing environmental ‘problems’ to the wto
To date, business lobby groups have had to take a case-by-case approach to their attacks upon environmental regulations and the precautionary principle (see below). However, their task would be much simplified if WTO rules would simply preside over Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs), and lobby groups have taken up this challenge with relish.

The way in which negotiations on the relationship between the WTO and MEAs (being held in the WTO’s Committee on Trade and Environment) are proceeding indicates that there is every likelihood that the WTO will reach an agreement that ensures the primacy of its own trade rules over environmental agreements. In particular, there is a significant risk that negotiations could allow the WTO to decide what trade measures may be included in a MEA or used to implement a MEA at the national level, limiting the right of governments to rule in favour of the environment. Industry will continue to push for the dominance of trade rules over environmental agreements like the Biosafety Protocol and the Kyoto Protocol.

Take, for example, the OECD’s Business and Industry Advisory Committee (BIAC). As the official business advisory group to the OECD, BIAC enjoys ample opportunities to influence policies in OECD member countries. BIAC’s Environment Committee is chaired by the corporate water giant Suez; Monsanto, Pfizer and BASF are vice chairs of its Biotechnology Committee; DuPont chairs the Trade Committee and Shell is Vice Chair of its Taskforce on Climate Change.

The 38 major industry lobby groups that make up BIAC have a consensus to support WTO negotiations on MEAs, which effectively means making trade measures in MEAs subservient to the WTO. They also strongly oppose any attempts to introduce precautionary measures into the WTO. Friends of the Earth and other social and environmental movements are calling for negotiations on the relationship between trade and environmental agreements to be shifted to the UN rather than being dealt with in the industry-dominated World Trade Organization.

pushing climate off the table
Exxon Mobil/Esso’s sleazy actions to undermine the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the resulting Kyoto Protocol have been widely exposed and discredited. Exxon Mobil was a key contributor to the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), the industry front-group that took a lead role in undermining initiatives to solve global warming. In 2002, Friends of the Earth’s claim that Exxon Mobil was largely responsible for the United States not signing the Kyoto Protocol was backed up by a leaked letter from Exxon Mobil to President Bush. The letter, referring to the upcoming Earth Summit negotiations, stated: “… the least important global environmental issue is potential global warming and we hope that your negotiators at Johannesburg can keep it off the table and out of the spotlight.”

throwing precaution to the wind
A ‘who’s who’ of the US business lobby – the National Foreign Trade Council, the International Chamber of Commerce, the US Chamber of Commerce and the Biotechology Industry Organization - is battling to undermine the ‘precautionary principle’, one of the key features of international environmental agreements and national environmental policy, in favour of what they term ‘sound science’.

The precautionary principle holds that potentially dangerous activities can be restricted or banned by governments on the basis of uncertainty, without having to provide conclusive scientific evidence that damage will occur. ‘Sound science’, on the other hand, would allow business much greater leeway, especially in cases where negative impacts cannot be proven in advance. The precautionary principle is the basis for policies ranging from many national government’s quarantine regulations to the EU’s GMO legislation.

WTO rules are an effective means for the corporate lobby to undermine the precautionary principle, because they can argue that environmental measures restrict trade more than is necessary and therefore contradict WTO agreements.

The National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC), a Washington-based trade lobby group with members including climate treaty saboteur Exxon Mobil, post-Iraq War contractors Bechtel and Halliburton (see p. 26), Citigroup, Microsoft, Pfizer (see p. 14) and public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, spent more than US$1.8 million dollars on dedicated trade lobbying in 2000.

The NFTC made a huge splash with its 2003 paper “Looking Behind the Curtain: The Growth of Trade Barriers that Ignore Sound Science”, which argues that the EU’s moratorium on GMOs as well as laws for tracing and labeling GMOs must be countered. The paper also calls for the overriding of Japanese and Korean quarantine requirements for fresh produce and processed fruit and nuts; the striking down of bans in many countries on various food additives; the overturning of EU chemicals legislation; and the trashing of a host of other national environmental and health policies. The paper received strong support from the US government, and US Department of Commerce personnel were apparently so impressed by the ideas it contained that they placed it prominently on their website.

The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), the world’s most powerful corporate lobby group, is not surprisingly an enemy of the precautionary principle. At a May 2003 meeting with French President Jacques Chirac, who was hosting the upcoming G8 Summit, the ICC urged him to support biotechnology and the use of, “sound scientific enquiry and reasonable caution”. Empathy with the genuine concerns of thousands of EU farmers and millions of consumers does not figure into the lobby group’s approach: ICC Secretary General Maria Livanos Cattaui bluntly called the EU’s moratorium on GMO foods “absolutism run riot”.