WTO Ministerial Section • Volume 2 • Number 19 • 25th May 1998
Effects of trade on the environment
On 19 May, WWF International presented the methodology it is developing for assessing the environmental impacts of trade agreements. Participants agreed that the impacts were difficult to quantify, not least because in many instances the exact cause of an observable effect is hard to pinpoint. For instance, in developing countries experiencing negative effects due to agricultural liberalisation, is it the WTO Agreement on Agriculture that is responsible for those effects? Or World Bank structural adjustment policies, or IMF conditions for loans? Or autonomus domestic policies? A Filipino NGO representative pointed out that in his country, deregulation and privatisation started well before the WTO Agreement, causing farmers a dramatic drop in sugar and corn prices, threatening the livelihood of some 400,000 smallholders and leading to increasing conversion of land use from food production to export crops. Market-driven and export-oriented development policies have also put badly needed land-reform programmes on hold. Although impacts such as these are readily detectable, a WWF case study of the effects of trade liberalisation on the Philippine corn sector concludes that a reliable methodology is still lacking for measuring the economic, social and environmental costs of trade liberalisation. At the meeting, WWF tabled a draft proposal for environmental assesment of trade agreements which is available from them. Please see contact information below.