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By Cat Lazaroff, Environmental News Service

Shopper considers his choice in the men's department at New York's Saks Fifth Avenue (Photo courtesy NYC Tourist)

Next Tuesday, the World Trade Organization (WTO) will hold its third Minesterial Conference in Seattle.

Delegates from all 134 member countries will haggle over the details of lucrative trade agreements and sometimes stifling trade regulations.

At stake: billions of dollars in imports and exports, and crucial protections for commercially traded plant and animal species, their habitats, and some innocent bystanders.

Negotiating Trade in the Global Economy

The WTO is the only international organization dealing with the global rules of trade between nations. It defines its main function as ensuring that trade flows as smoothly, predictably and freely as possible.

International trade is expanding, and U.S. President Bill Clinton calls these WTO negotiations essential to the creation of a more prosperous, open and equitable world. U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky noted recently that 80 percent of the world’s economic consumption takes place outside the U.S., and more than 12 million American jobs are attributed to exports.

"To grow and remain competitive in the years ahead, our farmers and businesses must have fair access to these markets," Barshefsky said at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Besides pushing for more open trade, the U.S. intends to promote environmental protections at the WTO conference, and, along with the Canadian government, has suggested the creation of an advisory committee on trade and the environment.

"We have got to put a human face on the global economy," Clinton told reporters last week. "As we expand trade, ordinary people have to benefit and they have to believe we're not destroying the environment. So I have concluded that we should do more to open up the trading system to labor and environmental groups, let them be a part of the development of trading rules and regulations, and have certain standards for the environment and for labor in these trade agreements."

"One of the reasons you're going to have thousands of demonstrators in Seattle," Clinton continued, "telling everybody that this world trading system is some sort of dark conspiracy to destroy the environment and keep down ordinary working families - is that they use funny language and they have big, secret rules, and they meet too much in secret in Switzerland. And I think we've got to open this process up."

The environmental demonstrators will be there because of fears that WTO rules are not aimed at preserving natural resources, but at helping to sell them off. Environmental groups argue the WTO has too much authority, giving it the power to undermine strong national environmental laws, he said.

Sea turtles can get caught in shrimp nets and drown, unless shrimpers install turtle exclusion devices (Photo courtesy Tropical Divers, Maui, Hawai'i)

For instance, the U.S. has already had to back down from a ban on shrimp imports from countries that do not use devices that protect sea turtles from drowning in shrimp nets. After several Asian countries sued the U.S., the WTO ruled the U.S. ban illegal. The U.S. has since proposed a weaker regulation allowing imports from individual ships that say they use turtle exclusion devices on their nets, even if their home countries do not require the devices.

While the U.S. is attempting to find a way to protect the environment while obeying the letter of WTO laws, other countries have openly flouted WTO rulings. "I believe in open trade, but it ought to be fair," Clinton said. "It's going to be impossible to sustain support for an open trading system if the rules and the rulings are ignored."

Free Trade Could Tie Nations' Hands

Mark Vallianatos, an international policy analyst for the Friends of the Earth USA, said last month that environmental groups do not want WTO market access agreements expanded into environmentally sensitive areas - such as forestry and fisheries - unless there is WTO reform reflecting deference to national environmental standards.

Scott Nova of the Citizens' Trade Campaign said the WTO regulated trading system operates with an "absence of meaningful labor and environmental standards." It has been given the ability to overturn national laws and regulations through a dispute settlement process in trade disputes without the transparency found in the democratic process, he said.

On Monday, U.S. Commerce Secretary William Daley said the Clinton administration has made it clear that nations have the right "to set environmental standards, based on science, at the levels they believe are necessary" regardless of whether international standards are lower.

The official Canadian position on the WTO talks, released last week, notes that Canada will work to "ensure that negotiating groups take environmental considerations fully into account so that trade policies and environmental policies are consistent and complement one another," and "ensure that the multilateral trading system supports the international pursuit of other goals, notably sustainable development and other social objectives."

Daley says the U.S. is seeking agreement at the WTO meeting to lower trade barriers that will help improve the environment, such as ending fishing subsidies that lead to too many boats seeking dwindling fish stocks.

Overfishing has driven some countries to catch undersize swordfish, like these at auction in Garrucha, Spain, in violation of international law (Photo by Miguel Murcia courtesy WWF)

"Environmental agreements, in this case, get at the heart of the problem: too many fish are being caught," he said Monday in a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. "The WTO works to make the job easier by reducing harmful subsidies."

The U.S. also wants the WTO to reduce tariffs on environmental and clean energy products, he said, to reduce their cost and make them more available. Daley says the Commerce Department is looking for new trade partnerships that will expand trade and protect the environment.

Business Groups May Block Environmental Talks

Yet Daley was not optimistic about the ability of the U.S. to advance this agenda. "We are having a very hard time convincing many countries around the world on some of these issues of labor, environment," Daley said. "And even a discussion of them in the context of the WTO - the support for that is very limited, and it's frustrating to us."

Prominent U.S. business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, which represents nearly three million U.S. companies, oppose negotiating environmental standards during the WTO talks. "U.S.

business ... stresses that these important issues should not be addressed in trade negotiations, whose intended purpose is to remove barriers to global trade and investment," according to a Chamber policy statement on the Seattle WTO ministerial.

The president of the U.S. Council for International Business, Thomas Niles, says developing countries are not likely to agree to a new round of trade talks if the agenda includes labor and environmental standards.

Trade need not be an enemy of the environment, according to a WTO report released last month, which maintains that "trade barriers generally make for poor environmental policy." Environmental problems are best addressed at source, whether they involve polluting production processes or undefined property rights over natural resources, says the comprehensive analysis by the WTO Secretariat.

Mike Moore started his three year term as Director-General of the WTO on September 1. (Photo courtesy WTO)

"Every WTO Member Government supports open trade because it leads to higher living standards for working families which in turn leads to a cleaner environment. This report underscores that trade and environment need not be contradictory but can indeed be complementary," said the new WTO director-general, Mike Moore.

The report, written by a WTO analyst and a North American Free Trade Association analyst, said the new round of trade liberalization talks that will be launched in Seattle could tackle environmental concerns, and "address subsidies that harm the environment, including energy, agricultural and fishing subsidies."

The international conservation organization World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), interpreted the report as acknowledging for the first time that trade damages the environment. The WWF wants the world trade body to "clearly accept its responsibility to help resolve this problem."

"The WTO has taken a positive step forward in diagnosing the clash between trade and the environment, but it has failed to acknowledge that some of its rules are part of the problem," said Charles Arden-Clarke, head of WWF's Trade and Investment Unit.

US Proposals Could Help - Or They Could Hurt

The U.S. agenda, which includes liberalizing WTO rules by reducing or eliminating tariffs on some natural resource products, is interpreted by some as an attack on the environment. Calling tariff removal a "global free logging" agreement, the Sierra Club argues that "prices for forest products would drop, increasing consumption and clearcut logging."

Environmentalists fear that removing international tariffs on wood products could significantly increase wood consumption (Photo courtesy Genetrade Wood Products)

A Clinton administration study, released this month by the Office of the United States Trade Representative and the Council on Environmental Quality, concluded that tariff reductions would have no environmental impact in the U.S. and little effect on forests worldwide.

"This analysis demonstrates that further opening trade in the forest products sector is consistent with our commitment to environmentally sustainable economic growth," said Barshefsky.

Others warn that trade liberalization could lead to increased U.S. imports of toxic waste from other countries, by making it harder for the U.S. to refuse to accept the shipments. The Asia Pacific Environmental Exchange and the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund released a report this month charging that the WTO would forbid the U.S. from treating foreign waste any differently from domestic waste.

Under WTO rules, all member countries must treat foreign and domestic goods equally. Therefore, the U.S. would be unable to prohibit the importation of toxic waste, the environmentalists said.

"Toxic waste is not a 'good' that should be subject to trade rules," said Jim Puckett of the Environmental Exchange.

A number of environmental groups will be on the attack in Seattle, kicking off with an all-day rally Monday, just before the official start of the WTO talks. Along with labor and human rights groups, they launched an ad campaign this month that asks "WTO: But what are we trading away?"

Conservationists suggest the answer could be clean air and water, and endangered species worldwide.