Bridges Trade BioRes • Volume 4 • Number 21.5 • 20th November 2004

IUCN World Conservation Congress

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Special Issue - 20 November 2004

IUCN World Conservation Congress International Trade – Friend or Foe of Biodiversity? Certification for Sustainability Cutting our losses – reducing illegal trade in natural resources What Future For Asia’s Wildlife Trade Social Justice and Equity in Conservation Trade @ the Members’ Business Assembly

International Trade – Friend or Foe of Biodiversity?

Urgent need for greater coherence and interaction between trade and environment policy-making processes emerged as one of the main calls for action throughout the workshop "International Trade - Friend or Foe of Biodiversity?", organised by ICTSD and IUCN on 19 November. Many participants felt that IUCN in particular – with its extensive network of governments, civil society groups, academia and increasingly businesses – could help foster interaction among the different communities, providing the knowledge necessary to move the debate forward. Thereby, IUCN could help empower the conservation community to take advantage of the windows of opportunity provided by the WTO’s Doha mandate as well as trade talks at the regional and bilateral levels to ensure that the outcomes are supportive of conservation objectives.

Trade – friend or foe?

Meena Raman, Chair of Friends of the Earth International, pointed to a clash of fundamentally different paradigms underlying free trade and environmental protection. For trade to become a ‘friend’ of biodiversity would require a fundamental reform of the economic order, she stressed. Ernst-Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Chairman of the German Parliament’s Commission on Globalisation, questioned whether the trade and environment regimes were really mutually supportive as often assumed, describing trade as "essentially a foe" of biodiversity. At the same time, there was a widespread feeling that trade liberalization was already well advance and moving forward and that there was an urgent need for the conservation community to engage in making it friendlier. It was noted that this would require a better understanding and articulation of the links between trade and biodiversity within the community in an effort to come up with creative thinking, actions and priorities on trade.

Building coherence

Many participants pointed to the lack of communication and interaction between the trade and environment communities in multilateral negotiations, potentially leading to incoherent results in the various forums that did not take into account the full range of concerns and priorities. This was seen to be particularly true for debates on access and benefit-sharing related to genetic resources and traditional knowledge and the interface with intellectual property rights which is being discussed in a variety of multilateral forums as well as at regional, bilateral and national levels. Concerns were also expressed over perceived imbalances in the international governance system, with seemingly disproportionate power given to private over public interests. However, rather than condemning the WTO, the solution might be to strengthen other parts of the system, thereby providing balances or complementary venues for discussing trade and environment issues as part of a systemic approach to the debate.

The broader context: Sustainable development, engines of economic growth, illegal trade

Many participants stressed the need to place the trade and biodiversity debate into the broader context of sustainable development, taking into account the special concerns of the South. It was also felt that there was a need to look beyond the WTO towards other engines of international trade and economic growth that cold stand in the way of sustainability. Among them, Simon Upton, Chair of the Roundtable on Sustainable Development at the OECD, raised unsustainable exploitation of natural resources in general – not only for the purpose of trade but also for domestic use – as one of the biggest foes of biodiversity. To address unsustainable consumption patterns, he pointed to the need to link the growing number of consumers and producers that are seeking a positive output. The realities of illegal trade were also highlighted, which is becoming an increasingly significant component of international trade – for instance in the UK 62 percent of tropical timber is imported illegally – due to the high profit margins and the generally low risk level.