6:01 AM Jul 13, 1994
WTO ENVIRONMENT GROUP SETS TENTATIVE AGENDA
Geneva 12 July (Chakravarthi Raghavan) -- The WTO Preparatory Committee's Sub-Committee on Trade and Environment agreed Monday, at its meetings in the autumn, to take up for detailed discussion and consideration three of the seven issues on its agenda. The Sub-Committee, chaired by Amb. Felipe Lampreia of Brazil, which will hold its next meeting on 12 September, agreed to take up the effects on trade and trade rules of environment charges and taxes (carbon tax etc) and ecolabelling and packaging requirements of countries. The Sub-Committee is planning three sessions in the autumn. At Marrakesh, the Ministers decided to direct the WTO's General Council at its first meeting to establish a Committee on Trade and Environment (CTE). The mandate of this Committee was set out in the Marrakesh decision, and pending the establishment of this Committee, the WTO Preparatory Commission was asked to set up a Sub-Committee to deal with the same issues and develop a work programme. The WTO's CTE is to report to the first biennial meeting of the WTO ministerial Conference when the work and terms of reference of the CTE will be reviewed. At its meeting Tuesday, the Sub-Committee on Trade and Environment decided to give priority in its work to three items on its mandate: * the relationship between the provisions of the multilateral trading system and: (a) charges and taxes for environmental purposes; (b) requirements for environmental purposes relating to products, including standards and technical regulations, packaging, labelling and recycling; * the relationship between provisions of the multilateral trading system and trade measures for environmental purposes, including those pursuant to multilateral environmental agreements; and * the effect of environmental measures on market access, especially in relation to developing countries, in particular the least developed among them, and environmental benefits of removing trade restrictions and distortions. Some work on the first and the second indented items have already been done in the GATT's Ukawa committee, and thus work in the Sub-Committee now can take it forward. The attempt of Austrian Ambassador, Winfried Lang to focus the Sub-Committee on the more "sexy" issues favoured by environmental groups like 'internalization of environmental costs', reviewing not the trade effects of environmental measures but the environmental effects of trade rules did not find favour with many other members. Some of the developing country delegations did not agree that the committee instead of looking at trade effects of environmental measures, as mandated should look into environmental effects of trade measures -- a view that some of the Northern NGOs are pushing. These delegates noted that some of these questions would have to be addressed in competent organs like UNEP, the UN's Commission on Sustainable Development, UNCTAD etc, and not in the GATT or the WTO which lacked competence and technical expertise. Lang, who was a member of the second GATT tuna panel, has been receiving encomiums from some Northern environment NGOs and some Northern-based international groups for his role on that panel. Several GATT members though have been critical of him for having discussed the panel's work and findings with some NGOs, before the panel finalised its work and submitted its report. This issue figured indirectly at the June meeting of the GATT Council and could come up at the July meeting. Ideas like 'internalization' and changing WTO/GATT trading rules to allow countries to take trade restrictive measures on environment grounds, and asking dispute panels to go not by the GATT/WTO rules but socalled international norms, had been brought up by several Northern NGOs at the GATT-organized Trade and Environment symposium in May. However other Northern groups, and Southern NGOs had questioned the motivations as well as the practicality of applying some theoretical concepts in international trade rules and trade measures.