space Press Releases, News Stories

By Geoff Winestock, staff reporter of the Wall Street Journal for the Dow Jones News,

Environmentalists were among the most vociferous protesters on the streets of Seattle last year, when trade ministers failed in an attempt to launch a new round of trade-liberalization talks. Parading dressed as butterflies and turtles allegedly threatened by WTO policies, they accused the WTO of ignoring health and ecological concerns in trade disputes. Free-trade advocates argue, however, that the latest case proves that WTO rules do just that.

"The environment is something that our members wrestle with all the time," says WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell. According to people familiar with the latest decision, the WTO's three-person expert panel found that while the French ban on asbestos breaches general WTO rules guaranteeing free trade, it is justified under a specific WTO provision on protecting human health. This breaks with earlier decisions striking down U.S. laws that set penalties for countries that fail to meet standards for drift-net fishing and gasoline imports. Those decisions largely concerned technical flaws in the U.S. law, but environmentalists regarded them as proof of the WTO's anti-green bias.

Amy Gonzalez, interim head of the Swiss-based Worldwide Fund for Nature, called the World Wildlife Fund in the U.S., gave cautious approval to the latest decision's apparent change of emphasis. "We see this as a positive development in the balance between trade and the environment," she said. Another crucial aspect of the decision is that it gives the benefit of the doubt to environmentalists in assessing scientific evidence of health and environmental risks.

After taking independent scientific advice, the panel sided with France, which argued that asbestos products pose the threat of lethal cancers, even though Canada claims that the chrysotile asbestos it exports is safe in controlled use. This may prove relevant in two other disputes between the U.S. and the European Union, on trade in genetically modified organisms and hormone-treated beef, where evidence of environmental and health risk is disputed. The WTO ruled last year that the EU lacked the scientific evidence for its ban on U.S. beef, and the EU plans a challenge based on new scientific evidence. The final version of the asbestos decision will be published in September, and Canada will have 30 days to appeal.