SINGAPORE, 8 February 2007 — The environment is often used as the favored club for “anti-globalization” protestors at IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings. However, according to WTO’s Director-General Pascal Lamy, “failure of the Doha negotiations would strengthen the hand of all those who argue that economic growth should precede unchecked without regard for the environment.” Lamy who was addressing the UNEP Global Ministerial Environment Forum in Nairobi on Feb. 5, 2007, warned that “trade and the WTO must be made to deliver sustainable development.”
In his address, Lamy referred to James Lovelock, the inventor of the electron detector’s, 1979 published work “ Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth” that warned that living matter is not passive, and that the earth responds to provocation. He told his audience that that “the earth’s air, oceans and land surfaces react in the face of threats to their very existence,” He added that “today, as we face environmental challenges of an unprecedented magnitude, like we do with climate change, there is little doubt that Gaia (earth) would react, and that humankind may suffer the consequences.”
Lamy noted that the UNEP’s Governing Council meeting could not be timelier as it came in the wake of many serious warnings about the environment as well as environmental disasters such the floods in Southeast Asian Nations like Indonesia and Malaysia. He described “sustainable economic development” as a “must.”
Lamy underlined that sustainable “development should be the cornerstone of our approach to globalization and to the global governance architecture that we create.”
He noted that the idea of sustainable development was “placed right at the heart of the WTO’s founding charter” and also a key element of the Doha Round of the WTO negotiations. “The environmental community” had played a decisive role in calling for greater mutual support between trade and the environment, he added.
He further said that globalization had ensured that “the world has become inter-connected to a point, that today it is impossible for a country to live and prosper in isolation of the rest of the world.”
Lamy admitted that while globalization offered opportunities it also required “careful management” and it also had “drawbacks.” He pointed out that, “the management of globalization would allow us to capture its benefits, while leaving behind its downside,” and called for more effective “global governance … at a level that transcends national boundaries.” Lamy noted that institutions on global governance must be strengthened to function as a more coherent whole.
Moreover, pricing of resources was a key element in ensuring a more efficient allocation of resources, he said, noting that completing the Doha Round would help the environment by “tearing down the barriers that stand in the way of trade in clean technologies and services, as well as a promise to reduce the environmentally harmful agricultural subsidies that are leading to overproduction and harmful fisheries subsidies which are encouraging over-fishing and depleting the world’s fish stock.”
“The WTO needs the engagement of the environmental community in these negotiations,” Lamy said and previous efforts “must be sustained, especially at this crucial phase of the Doha Round.” Though the WTO may be imperfect but, Lamy said “it continues to offer the only forum worldwide that is exclusively dedicated to discussing the relationship between trade and the environment.” He called on “the environmental community to support the environmental chapter of the Doha Round, and to provide its much needed contribution.”
“Trade and indeed the WTO, must be made to deliver sustainable development,” he underscored.
He noted that governments had made a start that would “allow them in the future to become bolder in addressing issues that have so far been left behind like the proper pricing of resources, the internationalization of externalities and sound energy policies.”
Lamy stressed that though the contribution of the Doha Round to the environment “is but a drop in the bucket of the solutions required to address the world’s environmental problems,” still that drop “needs to enter the bucket, so that governments are encouraged to begin looking at the bucket as a whole.” He added that “a sustainable development strategy linking all international actors must become our goal.”
