Oct 10, 1991

GATT WORKING GROUP ON ENVIRONMENT TO BE REVIVED.

GENEVA, 8 OCTOBER (CHAKRAVARTHI RAGHAVAN) – The GATT Council agreed Tuesday to convene a 20 year-old working group on trade and environment, which had never met since its establishment.

The working party was set up in 1971 to look at specific and individual cases of trade/environment conflicts that a Contracting Party could bring up. Chaired by a Japanese prince (now its country's Ambassador to Brazil) it has never met.

In the wake of the new awareness of environment issues and the pressure from their local environment groups, the EFTA countries sought the reconvening of the working party but with virtually a new mandate to look at the entire environment/trade issues.

Third World countries were opposed to this, seeing it as the opening gambit of the industrialised world to use environment as a new protectionist device in the GATT. They argued that any GATT involvement should await the UNCED process and the Rio summit.

Though a moribund body, any Contracting Party could have sought the convening of a meeting, as the EFTA countries did, and the secretariat would merely hive had to fix a date and issue an aerogram notice.

However, it became clear to everyone that if it met, it would have had to stick to its original very limited mandate and any attempt to expand it to discuss wider issues of environment/trade norms, etc., would have been opposed by others, thus throwing the ball back into the Council or the Contracting Parties to reach agreement on a new or expanded mandate.

For this reason, compromises were sought.

After months of consultations, first by Amb. Rubens Ricupero the chairman of the GATT Contracting Parties and (since his transfer to Washington as his country's Ambassador) by GATT Deputy Director-General Carlyle, an understanding appears to have been reached on the reconvening of the working party and its terms of reference.

However, at the Council this still ran into trouble when Uruguay, Colombia, Venezuela and Peru said they still needed time to consult their capitals on the terms of reference.

GATT sources attributed their stands to the feeling of some of them that they had not been sufficiently consulted.

As a result of the understanding, the working party is to be reconvened with an open-ended membership to look at some trade-environment issues.

The Chairman of the GATT Council is first to hold consultations to find a new Chairman for the working party. He in turn would then hold further consultations on the agenda for the working group.

A preliminary agenda, sketched out to the GATT Council by Carlyle who reported on the outcome of his Consultations, provided for the working group:

(a) To look at provisions in existing multilateral environmental agreements vis-à-vis GATT rules and principles.

The agreements to be looked at are the Montreal protocol on ozone layer, the Washington Convention on trade in endangered species and Basle Convention on control of trans-boundary movements of hazardous wastes and their disposal;

(b) Multilateral transparency of national environment regulations likely to have trade effects.

(c) Trade effects of new packaging and labelling requirements aimed at protecting environment.

The Chairman of the GATT Council is also to hold separate consultations on the question of GATT’s contribution to the UN Conference on Environment and Development and to its Preparatory Committee (which is due to hold its fourth session in New York in March 1992).

A hot "environment/trade" issue - the ruling of a GATT panel against the U.S. restrictions on imports of tuna and tuna products from Mexico and some others - did not come up.

The panel report was issued early last month and should have normally come up before the meeting, but was not on the agenda.

However, Mexico and the U.S. are reportedly holding consultations to find a bilateral agreement to resolve the problem. Otherwise the U.S. would have to change its law.

A number of other Contracting Parties had appeared before the panel, against the U.S. law and actions, because of the wide interest involved in the issues raised, including U.S. unilateralism and use of unilaterally established environment norms for trade purposes.

Any Mexico-U.S. agreement, and a Mexican decision not to press further with the issue in the Council, would leave the position of others in some uncertainty.

The issue of trade/environment interface and use of economic instruments to further protection of environment also figured at an UNCTAD consultation here this week.

Some environment experts suggested the GATT and its rules should be changed to take care of environment problems. Just as GATT had accommodated the problems of textile trade, it should also find a way of tackling the environment/trade problems, they said.

However many other participants were critical of such an approach.

They argued that this would merely make the GATT as a trade instrument even less effective without doing anything to protect the environment, and that all that would happen would be that countries, particularly the powerful, would use the "environment" as a new protectionist barrier against imports.

Problems of environment should be resolved by tackling environment problems closest to the source of environment degradation. Trade measures were not the sources of the environment degradation. While looking at effects of trade liberalisation on environment, one had also to look at impact on environment of trade protection.