If trade turns a green leaf

For most, trade and environmental protection would seem two wholly disconnected sectors. In fact, most governments and international forums have also been treating them separately and differently "" till they discovered that it was a mistake to do so. As a result, most of the multilateral trade agreements, including those facilitated by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and the global environmental accords, were conceived without much regard to each other. But, when it came to putting these pacts into force, they were found to impinge on each other in several ways that required a revisit to the whole issue of keeping them apart.

What is perhaps needed is a middle path, or a reconciliatory approach, that would allow trade to tread its own course without impairing the environment and vice-versa.

In fact, Anupam Goyal's book, The WTO and International Environmental Law: Towards Conciliation, even while analysing the various aspects of conflicts and complimentarity between the laws concerning trade and ecology, attempts ultimately to plead for forging mutual support and synergy between the two sectors. The best part of this volume is that the author has dealt with controversial and highly contentious issues dispassionately without showing any pro-trade or pro-environment leanings. However, the text uses too many abbreviations, which makes the reading a little cumbersome, forcing a reader to go to the section at the beginning of the book listing full forms of the acronyms (this list itself runs into five pages).

Indeed, one of the striking aspects that emerges from the well-argued and well-documented scrutiny of this issue in this volume is that while some of the negotiators of environmental pacts have, of late, tended to keep trade concerns in view, trade negotiators have largely been indifferent to the environment. In fact, the original General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) did not mention the word "environment" at all.

The author's reasoning for this is that while it is not necessary to protect the environment to facilitate trade, it is often necessary to regulate trade to protect the environment. Besides, environment protection measures are viewed by trade proponents largely as hurdles to global competitiveness. That trade practices, including some well within WTO norms, can cause environmental problems, or conflict with ecological objectives, often gets ignored.

The discord between trade and environment came to a head for the first time in 1991. This was a consequence of a GATT-panel ruling that the US embargo on tuna fish from countries that did not follow the US rules on protecting dolphins during tuna fishing violated GATT rules "" and, thus, could not be justified. Of course, this ruling got modified substantially in similar cases that came up subsequently before the WTO appellate body, but the resultant mutual distrust between trade proponents and environmentalists has endured ever since.

The author has identified several issues which tend to lead to disputes between the two sectors. These include subsidies for environment protection and export controls for resource conservation, both of which can arguably be viewed as trade-distorting measures. Besides, there can be inconsistencies in the domestic environmental regulations of the two trading partners that may necessitate some curbs which may be viewed as unfair by the other.

Interestingly, the book argues that if the current global trade norms are not fully in tune with environment protection concerns, the WTO is not to be blamed for it. For, the WTO does not govern or regulate trade; it regulates statutory and administrative rules that restrict or distort trade. "Therefore, to invoke the GATT/WTO institutions to ban certain practices of environmentally dirty trade, is knocking at the wrong door, as the WTO does not have the requisite environmental expertise," the author maintains.

He also goes on to suggest that the task of defining the trade-environment relationship should be undertaken by other global bodies, such as the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development. Further, the WTO's committee on trade and environment, set up following a decision to this effect at the Marrakesh ministerial meeting, could work with the sustainable development commission to reconcile the trade provisions of international environmental agreements with those of the WTO accord and other multilateral trade pacts.

THE WTO AND INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
TOWARDS CONCILIATION

Anupam Goyal
Oxford University Press
Price: Rs 695; Pages: 424