Only yesterday, trade was the preserve of specialists who agonized over obscure details of quotas and subsidies. But environmentalists have arrived with political clout, and traders are scrambling to accommodate them. U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills hastily named a few to her advisory committees. The 103-nation General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT, which is in the midst of an arduous negotiation to reduce trade restrictions, has activated an environmental committee to fend off critics. And as the United States, Canada and Mexico rush to initial a North American Free Trade Agreement by midAugust, pollution and hazardous waste are potential show stoppers. Worries a White House aide: “This is the one issue that could upset the NAFTA if it’s not handled right.”
“The issue” is an altogether new one. For nearly half a century, nature lovers had ignored GATT talks aimed at lowering trade barriers, and they took no notice when the U.S.-Canada free-trade pact was bargained in 1987. It was only when the NAFTA talks began last year that they demanded a role. Then, last August, GATT legal experts ruled against a U.S. law embargoing tuna from countries that don’t require their tuna boats to avoid killing dolphins. That provision, the experts said, wrongly uses trade sanctions to impose U.S. environmental standards abroad. The decision does not override U.S. law–ATfT rules allow the United States to offer other trade concessions instead of repealing the statute-but it alarmed environmentalists who’d never even heard of GAIT. “One of the best means to enforce environmental laws has been use of the embargo,” says Martha Glenn, a lobbyist for the Humane Society of the United States.“This is what got us into [trade policy].”
At the beginning the greens fumbled: they started out arguing that more trade means environmental degradation, and their attacks on the proposed Mexico deal led the Bush administration to dismiss their cause as a cover for protectionist interests. But most major groups now acknowledge that trade liberalization is inherently neither good nor bad for nature. That has induced the administration to make amends as it prepares to submit the NAFTA for congressional approval. “We were all behind the curve,” says one high-ranking official.
Hills and other negotiators, however, haven’t exactly hit it off with the greens. Some groups, including the Sierra Club and the Earth Island Institute, have joined with labor to back a campaign opposing both the NAFTA and the GAFT negotiations. Others, such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the National Wildlife Federation, have steered clear of such entanglements but wonder whether the administration takes them seriously. In the end they’re likely to support the NAFTA, but they consider its environmental provisions far too weak. “You have a clash of cultures as environmentalists and trade people come together,” says Environmental Protection Agency official Daniel Esty. “They’re talking past each other.”
That’s no surprise. Environmentalists “come at it with a new style and a totally different set of expectations,” says University of Maryland trade expert I. M. Destler. Although there are major differences of opinion among them, all worship openness and public participation; trade diplomats, by contrast, often succeed through backroom bargaining. Environmentalists believe problems like the killing of dolphins are so urgent that the U.S. government should deal with them quickly and, if necessary, alone; trade experts warn of conflicts if countries try to impose their rules on one another.
These disagreements make the marriage between traders and environmentalists a rocky one at best. And touchy problems such as defining when greenness goes too far and disrupts commerce stand in the way of harmony. Take Germany’s new law requiring that all packaging be recycled. The ecological purpose is clear, but so are the consequences for trade: foreign firms that don’t sell enough in Germany to justify changing their tubes and boxes may have to withdraw from the market. Both the European Community and GATT may have to decide whether the law unduly interferes with trade.
Their own competition for public attention shapes environmentalists’ approach to trade. In connection with the NAFTA, they have raised an uproar over chemicals dumped by maquilas, assembly plants in Mexican border cities. That generates lots of ink, since the shifting of work from U.S. factories to maquilas is an emotional issue in the United States. But it may be a less critical issue than, say, paving Mexican streets to cut down airborne dust or drilling wells to avoid cutoffs of water. “There’s a real problem with the focus on the maquilas,” says Richard Kamp, a NAFTA skeptic who runs the Border Ecology Project in Bisbee, Ariz. “It’s the political thing to do at the moment.”
Negotiators are finding some other green demands even less tractable. U.S. environmentalists want guarantees that Mexico will enforce the environmental regulations it has on the books. Rejoins Hills: “I don’t think Californians want a Mexican panelist to tell them how to run their environmental rules.” Their demand that Mexicans be allowed to sue U.S.-owned companies in U.S. courts stirs up old fears of domination. Says Francisco Lara, a Sonora environmentalist, “Mexican problems should be resolved by Mexicans.”
The debate goes well beyond the United States. European environmental groups also have a newfound interest in trade, and they don’t always see eye to eye across the Atlantic. Many Americans, for example, figure that lower farm subsidies will reduce planting of environmentally sensitive land and curb overuse of fertilizers and pesticides. Many European greens, on the other hand, oppose subsidy cuts, fearing the end of the hedgerows and manure piles that make Europe’s countryside so bucolic.
The struggle to link environment and trade will only grow more complex. Environment is expected to dominate GAIT’s future agenda. Max Baucus, head of the U.S. Senate’s trade subcommittee, proposes defining lax regulation as a subsidy: if a U.S. industry is injured by imports from foreign factories spewing smoke that exceeds U.S. limits, Washington could slap duties on the foreign goods. But that invites countries that find American laws too lax to try the same tactic to block U.S. exports. “We’re charting new territory here,” Baucus says. “It’s an opportunity.” Unless traders and environmentalists figure out how to use it, the upshot will be nasty trade disputes for decades to come.
The differences among environmentalists and trade experts go beyond ideology to the technical details of writing trade agreements.
Environmentalists want any rules protecting health or natural resources to be valid, but trade experts worry that it’s easy to design “green” rules that squeeze imports.
Should GATT accept trade bans under pacts such as the endangered-species treaty-thereby making GATT members uphold environmental accords they didn’t sign?
Are factories in countries with weak pollution laws getting a subsidy and, if so, should countries with tougher rules be able to restrict imports of their products?
