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Transcript from a panel session at the Society of Environmental Journalist's 10th National Conference. Dan Seligman of the Sierra Club and Jennifer Haverkamp from USTR participated, Scott Miller with KING TV Seattle moderated. Scott Miller (Moderator; KING-TV Seattle): On my immediate right is Jennifer Haverkamp. She’s the assistant US trade representative for the environment natural resources. She’s held that post since 1995. She participated in a number of negotiations for the Clinton administration, the US government, among them the North American Free Trade Agreement, and she oversees the development of US environmental objectives for negotiations before WTO, which of course is the organization which sort of draws us all together today. To her right is Dan Seligman. He’s directed the Sierra Club’s Responsible Trade Program since 1993, and he helped organize some of the grassroots mobilization at WTO in Seattle. He’s testified before Congress and written numerous articles for a number of publications on trade issues and the environment. And I’m Scott Miller, I’m the environmental specialist for KING-TV in Seattle, so I was at ground zero for the WTO riots. It was a year ago, I can’t believe it, almost a year ago, end of November last year. Its truly one of the most remarkable stories I’ve ever covered for its complexities. It was one of those stories, and they don’t come around all that often, especially when you’ve been in the business for awhile, that really took me a couple of months just to digest myself, what the significance of the some of the things I had seen happen in Seattle was. And of course one of the things, as a Seattle resident, was the most gripping image that I think the world associates, to a certain degree, with the WTO meetings and the subsequent civil disobedience there is the sight of Pike Place Market engulfed in gas and the scrawlings in downtown. But really, as we moved away, and downtown was repaired, and the gas cleared from the air and from my respiratory system, it became clear to me that those were important local stories and important local images that will stay with Seattle for awhile and will influence local politics for awhile, and probably should. But that the real lasting, important aspects of that story for the rest of the world had nothing to do with the vandalism of Nordstroms or Starbucks downtown by a few people who overstepped their bounds, had nothing to do with how well the Seattle police did or didn’t plan for the civil disobedience that happened in Seattle. I think the thing, as I get some distance from this story, that strikes me as being the most important for people outside the focus on, was what happened at the march that was not violent, whatsoever. The march that was planned and permitted, and there were anywhere from, depending on who you talk to, 15–20,000 people. Because the composition of that march was truly something that took me by surprise when I finally got a chance to look at it, when we finally got away from the hubbub and violence that was happening on our streets. You had people dressed as turtles, you had people dressed in hardhats. You had tree-huggers, and you had tree-cutters. You had this coalition of people that came from a huge variety of causes and walks of life and socio-economic backgrounds and had a whole panoply of causes, that made the reporters, those of us who were actually trying to describe what this was all about; it really brought us up short. It was very very difficult for us to sit there and explain to people what is it that brings these people together, and what is it that their so concerned about. Because on the one hand someone was concerned about the shrimp harvest techniques. On another corner you’d see someone who was worried about child labor in China. And the causes seemed so diverse, but there was something that brought all these people together. And the word that kept being used by the protesters themselves was globalization. Globalization represented the umbrella concept for what inspired these people to take to the streets of Seattle, often times coming from great distances to do so. So I thought that’s what I would start asking our panelists, is if, since I had such a difficult time, although I tried, explaining what was globalization to our viewers in my allotted two and a half minutes on television, and why people felt so strongly about it that they were marching on our streets. I thought that I’d ask you two if you could explain what globalization is and tell us if its something that we need to be afraid of. Obviously at least 15 or 20,000 people on the streets of Seattle were. Jennifer, why don’t we start with you. Jennifer Haverkamp (USTR): Well, I think globalization is a very complicated subject as you said, and it means, definitely different things to different people. But I’m glad that you focused the question on what is globalization rather than what is it about trade liberalization that got these people in the streets. Because I think very much that is an important factor to consider here, and that is that globalization is affecting people’s lives in very many ways. Trade is contributing to that, but its not the whole story, its part of it. To a certain extent globalization is more about the significant disparities in income distribution, the fact that people around the world see that there are haves and have-nots, and they’re trying to figure how the changes in the global economy are affecting that, and people see winners and they see losers. And that’s definitely true, there are losers in this debate. There are people whose, say in the United States, the trade aspect of it is what I’m most familiar with, trade is creating lots of jobs, lots of good-paying jobs. We’ve actually had an increase in manufacturing jobs over the last eight years. But in fact, there are also the more traditional types of manufacturing jobs that are going away. And how you deal with this is an issue that’s much bigger than opening markets. Its all about the social safety net, its about healthcare coverage, its about tax policy, its about job re-training. It a lot of things that need to be done to help people adjust to a changing economy. Globalization is happening. I think if protesters are trying to turn back the clock, that’s not likely to be a very successful strategy. Its more how do we address it, deal with it, and ensure that our economy, our regulatory system, our people, are in a situation to absorb these changes. It also, though, a case of addressing some of the very legitimate concerns that people in the street were articulating. From our perspective, there were very real concerns raised about the transparency of those institutions. And if people want to hear more, I can talk more about what those concerns are, and how this government has been really the leader in the world in trying to open up the WTO and open up other trade institutions to put a spotlight on whats going on there, to increase the public understanding and thereby the legitimacy of these institutions, and bring the prospectors of the full range of stake holders into the deliberations of that body. What has Seattle meant for us in terms of a trade agenda? When you say should we be afraid of what happened in Seattle, that was question we had the second week of December after Seattle ended. But you look at whats happened this year, and I think that the trade agenda is moving forward in a very positive way. You’ve seen this year not only the Congressional votes on China’s exession to the WTO. There’s a vote in Congress on whether the United States should stay in the WTO, which was mandated five years ago, that we have this vote this year. And there were more votes in favor than the first time around in ’94 when we first brought the WTO agreements to Congress. We passed Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, we passed the Caribbean Basin Initiative, we completed a trade agreement with Vietnam, we’re hoping this next week to complete a trade agreement with Jordan that will really break new ground on bringing environment and labor provisions into the trade agreement itself. And so the trade agenda is moving it forward but we’re moving forward in a new way. We are very much trying to address labor consumer environmental concerns in what we’re doing. We’re trying to do business differently. Dan can say whether he thinks we’re making progress on that or not. But we are bringing forward, we have a new policy on doing environmental reviews of major trade agreements. We’ve done a review of our advisory committee system on how to improve stake-holder input into the way US makes policy. And trying to make other improvements to how we interact with the public, to help both improve our policy making and take these considerations into account, and also to help people better understand what the trading system is and isn’t. Scott Miller: Dan, what do you think? What is globalization? Give me your best crack at a definition and is it something that we need to be afraid of? Dan Seligman (Sierra Club): I’m actually not going to answer your question. I’m going to break the rules again. To me, the issue; obviously globalization is a phenomenon is at the heart of what we’re talking about. Globalization isn’t actually that complicated. It’s the disruption or the rupture of all sorts of traditional boundaries of politics, of ecology, of place, of culture because of the integration of global commerce: trade investment in particular. So globalization as a thing is fairly straightforward in understanding what it is. And of course globalization is driven, I think I would agree with Jennifer, its driven by a lot of factors besides trade rules. Its driven primarily, I would say, by sweeping cultural technological changes that develop. The internet would be exhibit A, I would suggest. But globalization of course also has real physical components. It also means the globalization of the timber industry and of the mining industry, the securing of concessions in remote wild places, and thereby the destruction of those remote places. Basically the colonization of the remaining uncolonized places of the Earth’s surface by industrial forms of production. That’s globalization. And I somewhat take issue with the concept that there are winners and losers, and the reason we have a debate about globalization is because the losers are mad, even though globalization and the trade that is part of it supposedly benefits us all. I think in some real ways we are losers from globalization, because it is propagating a form of industrial economy that is in my view is ultimately unsustainable and needs to be disciplined by government rules to insure that natural and physical systems are not being run down to the point that they can no longer sustain life on the planet. So I think globalization is inherently problematic, all aspects of globalization are not bad, I’m not suggesting that. Some are very good. But in the big picture where you view environment as kind of the core, the fundamental issue of the next century, I think that globalization is inherently something we all need to look at. But if I could I want to zero in on a couple more specific things. The Sierra Club got interested in the whole trade and environment debate not primarily because of the globalization problem, or not primarily as we have a problem with trade as such, the movement of goods back and forth across the planet’s surface, or between countries. We got into globalization, or the trade issue because of a new set of institutions and rules that are propagating global free trade, specifically the WTO, NAFTA, and these other major trade agreements. We can have a lot of discussion about what trade agreement are, but in the simplest terms, trade agreements are rules that enhance corporate property rights at the expense of what we have considered here for the last 50 years in the United States, to be government prerogatives: to adopt and implement laws and regulations in the public interest. So, trade agreements, for those who are familiar with to draw an analogy with another recent political debate, for those who are familiar with the Contract with America, we consider trade agreements to be a Contract with America by other means. Many of the principles are the same: the notion that a private corporation can sue a government for the taking of property if there’s an environmental law that infringes their profits. The requirement that health and safety standards be subjected to a scientific risk assessment. So on and so forth. There are all sorts of restrictions being put, in the name of trade, which is really a fundamental misnomer on the ability of government to pursue the public interest, and of course we’re particularly interested in the environmental angle. I don’t want to leave here without really addressing your professional needs, which is how the hell do you write about this stuff? I think that the issues have matured to the point, we’ve had enough experience with them, that trade rules are having impacts on the quality of life, on the quality of the environment, in every community across the United States and around the world. We have, just to check off a few quick examples, a global negotiation on a convention to control dangerous chemicals called persistent organic pollutants. The United States Trade Representative is part of forming our policy in that negotiation. POPs, as you know, persist in the environment. They have impacts on the development of animals and human beings, often adverse. And unless they’re controlled everywhere, they can’t really be controlled anywhere, because of their nature, of the way they move around the planet, and their persistence in the environment. Its my view, and Jennifer and I can have a debate about this, that US Trade Representative, is now weakening the POPs convention that would ban certain of these substances. That of course affects mothers milk – Scott Miller: Just to be clear, how are they doing that? How is the US Trade Representative doing that, in what agreement and in what form? Dan Seligman: I don’t think you’ll see any written documents on this. But, we actually don’t have any, but my understanding from the folks who work closely with USTR on this issue, the US has taken a position that if the POPs treaty is strong enough to contain trade measures, enforcement mechanisms that affect the flow of persistent organic pollutant chemicals through international trade, then the US government will insist on there being subordination of that treaty to the World Trade Organization rules. I could give you a bunch of other examples, about forests, about what else did I talk about, about takings-type rules that are being applied to efforts at the state level, particularly California, to adopt a new chemical phase-out so it would protect water. And again, the kind of situation that’s developed in California could in fact easily affect any state in the nation. So these are now, trade is no longer out there, its no longer an issue for the experts, its no longer for technocrats at the global level. It is now becoming an issue that is affecting, as I said, the quality of life and the ability to regulate in every community across the United States. And the last thing I would say is tat I think that environmental reporters actually have an absolutely critical role to play in ensuring, in shaping this debate. By and large this discussion has been one in a narrow circle of peoples. The reporting is by and large handled by business and trade reporters, a narrow circle of them in Washington, D.C. But unless we get environmental reporters to write about these issues and explain to people how their lives are being affected, we’re not going to have the full public discussion, the full democratic debate, about the nature of trade that we need. And if we don’t have that debate, in my view, we’re going to have a system of trade rules essentially developed of, by, and for big corporations at the expense of the environmental protection I know my organization is committed to, and I think that most Americans want. Scott Miller: I guess if you had to generalize about some of these concerns, over what free trade would do, if you had to lump a lot of these concerns together, it would be the notion that some how these trade agreements don’t allow local jurisdictions, local meaning as large as the US government, from making our own rules. From saying, these are the food we think are safe, these are the chemicals that we don’t want in our country, these are the products that we think people ought to buy. Let me use an example that I used in some of my stories in an example leading up to WTO, and that is the issue of forest certification, where the city of Seattle is trying to pass an ordinance that would require city purchasers to buy "certified forest products" forest products that are certified to come from sustainable forests, forests that don’t hurt wildlife and water quality and such. And there is concern among the people who are promoting forest certification that ultimately that could be seen as an unfair trade practice by countries that don’t follow those rules and regulations. Another example that we saw front and center on the streets of Seattle were the sea turtles, people dressed up as sea turtles, of course. The background on that one is the concern that some of the gear used to catch shrimp is also deadly to sea turtles. And the efforts to restrict that gear were brought to WTO successfully, and that is inhibiting the ability to stop the use of that gear world-wide. So let me throw it out as a more general question, as I’m sure each of you have your own examples to illustrate your point. Those are the ones that I chose. Does free trade, do these agreements, restrict us in any way as a society, or other countries for that matter, from deciding what they think is safe, what they think is good for the environment, what products people ought to buy? Are we having to live by somebody else’s rules under these things? Jennifer? Jennifer Haverkamp: Dan, you and I need to talk about POPs, and I won’t take everybody’s time up on the details of that, but now I know where the letter writing campaign came from, because we’ve all been scratching our heads saying, ‘why do they think we’re doing something in the POPs agreement?’ Anyway, broader question, are the trade agreements inhibiting our ability to regulate public health, safety and the environment. We are of the very strong view that they really are not a concern of the magnitude that people are talking about. And that the rules in fact strike a good balance between insuring that regulators can pursue legitimate domestic policy objectives and protect the public health, safety and the environment, at the same time making sure in the global trading system, other countries don’t use those as sham pretexts for protectionism. And the trading system has had environmental exceptions, in the GATT agreement for instance, since 1948. There’s one for protection – you have obligations under the trade rules that you need to follow. Those obligations don’t have to be followed if you have a measure to protect human, plant or animal life or health, to conserve exhaustive natural resources, but it does say that your measures must not be arbitrary and unjustifiable discrimination, or a disguised restriction on trade. And the debate has really focused around a few cases. There’s two categories of cases. There are the WTO cases, there are a couple of high-profile cases like shrimp-turtle, that have involved the environment. There are some NAFTA expropriation cases that people have a lot of concern about. They’re a different sort of dispute. But I guess the thing that I would say is that when you look at the details of these cases, and they are factually very complicated, the cases that the United States lost involving gasoline, EPA gasoline measures, involving the shrimp-turtle dispute, and the most recent environmental case that came out of the WTO where the French won a case where Canada challenged their asbestos regulations, and won, the French won. The trend really for the Jurisprudence and the WTO is moving in a direction that we’re very happy with, and when you look at the specifics of those cases you understand, you know, whether you like it or not, why other countries brought those cases. In the gasoline case, EPA provided a regulation that said US refiners could keep their gasoline as clean or as dirty as it was in 1990, but foreign refiners had to meet a statutory average. Whether they were clean or dirty in 1990, they had to improve theirs. And two other countries said, ‘we have the paper work. We can prove what our production was 1990, why don’t we get the same right?’ The measure also said that Canada could in fact take advantage of the provision but other countries couldn’t. When we lost that case, editorials in the Post and NY Times, our advisory committee on trade and environment all told us we ought to comply with it. And EPA amended its regulations in a way that is fully compliant with the Clean Air Act, that is fully protective of the air quality in the United States. They recently did an analysis of the quality of gasoline coming in from foreign countries, and found that it is not degrading air quality. So that’s, kind of, that case. The shrimp-turtle case, we lost, but in a way that, this gets into the details, but we’re actually quite pleased with the jurisprudence of that case. It said that the measure at issue which is a law that prohibits imports of shrimp from countries that are not catching that shrimp in a manner protective of sea turtles. It said that the law itself was okay. It was how the state department was implementing that law where it found discrimination. Things like the fact that we gave countries in the wider Caribbean Basin three years to come into compliance with that law, but when a court directed us to apply it worldwide, we gave the rest of the world only four months. That we’d given a lot more technical assistance to the Caribbean Basin countries to learn how to use TEDs, and not to the other countries. There are more details to that, but again, the state department went back, amended its regulations in a manner that we feel fully implements the appellate body report of the WTO and in fact is fully protective of sea turtles. And State is out there negotiating a sea turtle protection agreement with the countries in the, in Asia, the area that brought the case, Pakistan, one of the complainants in the case, followed the new measures and is now certified so their shrimp is coming in. So yes, its put a lot of people in the streets in turtle costumes that you could say the WTO decided a case against a US measure, but when you get into the details we felt pretty good about what the appellate body said about it, and also when you look at why those countries brought the dispute, you want to think about why they did it. Thailand has always been certified, their shrimp has always come in, yet they brought that case because thy felt as a matter of principle that the US should not be able to use our market leverage unilaterally to change their behavior. That’s a complexity of this that I think is important to understand, is that other countries view the WTO as a place where they negotiated certain market access, and if we have measures that deny them that market access, they want to dispute that, and determine whether or not that’s a violation of the deal that they got when we negotiated the agreements that we’re – Scott Miller: So you’re saying all is well that ends well, as far as the shrimp-sea turtles, even though we got our nose bloodied along the way. Jennifer Haverkamp: Well, I would say we thought we should have won that case and its not perfect, but its still going in a decent direction. Its also the case that you look at the 140 or 150 disputes in the WTO, only a couple have addressed environment, and that’s not the vast majority of our environmental laws and regulations. This isn’t about an institution set up to target environmental health and safety measures. Most measures are not subject to any challenge. The few that are, a measure doesn’t get to dispute settlement unless the party bringing the case thinks they have really good reasons for bringing it. Scott Miller: Dan, does the shrimp-sea turtle case to you represent something different about the way WTO works? Dan Seligman: Yes it does, something quite different. Let me answer that and then put it in a little context. As a consequence of the, or at least we don’t know what was in the minds of the State department when they changed the regulations, but as a consequence, or at least following the initial WTO ruling in the shrimp-turtle case, is the analysis of every environmental organization that has anything to do with saving sea turtles, that the regulations were weakened in a very severe way, the US regulations. And while the law was not on its face deemed trade illegal by the WTO, the regulations were. And of course if you know anything about environmental protection, regulations are the heart and soul of what you’re concerned about. And so, essentially what happened is that before the ruling, the US required that countries selling shrimp into the US market had to adopt a regime that would require these turtle excluder devices for all their shrimp boats. And what the new regulations say is that only individual shrimp boats, out of the tens of thousands of boats trawling for shrimp in the world, only individual shrimp boats wishing to sell into the US market need to equip their nets with TEDs. Now, if you know anything about enforcement, you know that that standard is almost impossible to enforce from the US shores. You have no idea whether turtle-deadly shrimp is being passed off as turtle-safe shrimp when it finally gets to your market. And second, from an environmental standpoint, the new regulations are not workable, are not going to achieve their objective, simply because sea turtles are a highly migratory species. The critter might escape your net from a boat in Georgia, migrates across the ocean to Malaysia, and there it would potentially get caught in somebody else’s net and drown. So from our view this is the best smoking gun case we have of how trade rules in fact can be used to weaken environmental standards. Jennifer Haverkamp: Can I respond directly to that? Scott Miller: Sure, go ahead. Jennifer Haverkamp: I think this is an example of why this issue is so hard to cover. Because it is so complicated. What Dan is describing, the State department, before the WTO case ever came down, wanted to implement its program in a way that allowed whats called shipment-by-shipment certification of turtles. To say, ‘these shrimp were caught using TEDs, no harm to sea turtles.’ And domestic litigation by environmental groups in fact switched the program to say, in fact the shrimp can’t come in unless there is a national program. The other country has to have a program that says every shrimp we catch is caught using TEDs. And whether its for export to the US market, export to a third country, or consumption domestically, which is I think why you understand some of the level of sovereignty concerns on the part of the party of countries who brought the case against us. So, there’s a complicated chronology of domestic litigation and WTO litigation, but the main point there is the State departments original objective was to have shipment-by-shipment certification. They went back to that after a court of appeals threw out domestic litigation on procedural grounds, so State has gone back to shipment-by-shipment certification. In parallel with the WTO case but not because of it, there’s now litigation again, trying to get them to again eliminate the shipment-by-shipment process. Scott Miller: Right, it is a complicated – all of these trade issues – end up being very very complicated. And I think that’s a point well taken that reporters always need to examine the fine print in all of these issues because they, one thing I discovered is that they’re rarely as simple as they seem. However, the concept is still on the table, which is shouldn’t countries have the right to decide what products they deem to be safe, they deem to be environmentally friendly. Or should some body that is outside of voters control, so to speak, have the right to determine that? I mean, to put the shoe on the other foot, we’ve got the same situation with beef that we’re exporting Europe, where Europeans don’t want our beef because they say its got hormones in it, and we say that’s an unfair trade practice. Don’t the Europeans have the right to do that? Jennifer Haverkamp: Again, as I was saying, the trade rules provide flexibility for the governments to do this. So there are some constraints. Admittedly some constraints to address concerns about being fair, discriminatory, and sham purposes. When you look at the history of the beef-hormone case, there’s this interesting coincidence that the time that they decided to ban imports of our hormone treated beef was the same time that they had this mountain of reserved beef under their program for promoting agricultural production within Europe. Their scientists had repeatedly found that those particular hormones were safe. I think the view of the United States is that of course if European consumers don’t want to buy hormone treated beef that’s their right. And in fact one way we’re trying to resolve this dispute now is to lift the limits they had even on how much hormone-free beef we could sell in Europe. But that’s more a question of consumer preference rather than national mandating that no hormone-treated beef can be allowed in. When you look at the science of the particular hormones they are trying to exclude, the natural occurring levels of these hormones in eggs are way way higher than in the beef. And they had lots of scientific studies finding that those hormones were safe. And so you may want to take the position that if, for consumer pressure reasons, a country ought to keep a product out, you know, then you’re not going to agree with the balance struck in the trade rules. But we felt the beef hormones was really a case, started out as one about protecting the market. As a general matter, to look at this, and I think the way we look at this, is that the United States has the best regulatory system in the world. We have the Administrative Procedure Act, we have ways to challenge our rules and regulations. They have to be rational, reasonable, scientifically based. Many other countries, the way they set their standards and regulations, you don’t want to know how they’re done. And it’s a very political process. And we’re willing, in the trading system, to allow a bit of risk to our regulatory regime, in exchange for being able to raise questions about some that are done by other countries. The Japanese varietal apples case is a good example, where they were saying that for every variety of apples, we had to go through the same multi-year testing process to determine whether or not certain procedures that we undertake keep coddlingwads out. And that was about protecting the Japanese market from US fruit. And the statutory mandate from Congress, the US interests that the office US trade representative and the rest of the administration pursues on trade, is it is good and in the public interest of the United States to have markets abroad for our products. Trade is a big part of the strong economy. Scott Miller: Dan? Dan Seligman: Yeah, let me just finish with a thought. I think that maybe the news here is that what we have is an agency, the US Trade Representatives Office developing trade rules, which is, we talked about, are now setting all sorts of limits on what governments can and cannot do to adopt regulations and laws. There’s a binding obligation for governments to comply with those rules. Governments must do it. And there are a range of issues now that USTR is becoming an environmental, or in our view an anti-environmental voice for the US government. The impacts are not confined to the overt and high profile challenges that have come through the WTO. But they also include what we call a "chilling effect" on environmental regulation. Just to site another, incredibly important ecologically speaking, example: As commerce grows, more and more micro-organisms, insects, plants move around the planet. There are a number of books coming out, recently World Watch, and some others, describing how, essentially through trade, we’re versing 250 million years of separation of tectonic plates and movement of continents apart. Essentially because of the volume of trade we’re smashing all of the continents back together so that organisms that developed in isolation from each other are now essentially being allowed to share the same habitat. And the consequence of this merging of ecosystems is that a few more competitive species are coming to dominate different ecozones. Right now, invasive pests cost the US economy $138 billion every year. And these trade rules come into play here because the federal agency of the US Department of Agriculture, The Animal Plant Health Inspection Service repeatedly invokes WTO rules to explain why it cannot implement the most effective pest prevention strategies. And the basic requirement of course is that the WTO insists that the country perform a risk assessment which is a very expensive process, before it can prevent a dangerous critter, be it an insect, a micro-organism, what have you, plant, from any other country. By and large APHIS has, as a consequence, an open door policy. Unless there’s already been a risk assessment conducted, they will let in a plant or animal because of the trade constraints that are imposed upon them. So, the thought I want to end with is that, there are lots of backyard stories. The Asian long horn beetle, for example, which is in Chicago, and has potentially devastating impacts on the hard wood floors of Michigan, was arguably brought into the country because of APHIS’s lax behavior as a consequence of the trade rules that is compelled to live up to. While the stories and the issues can be arcane once you get into the innards of them, there’s a toe-hold, I think, for reporters in some of the real world effects that we’re starting to see. And as I said when I began, the nature of these trade rules is in flux, they’re under development right now, they’re in negotiation, and unless we have the public scrutinizing these processes and engaging in the debate, we’re going to have far more damaging trade rules than we otherwise would, and so I invite you, whether you agree with me or Jennifer, simply to write about these issues. Scott Miller: Real briefly I want to get out some questions from the audience here. Jennifer Haverkamp: Just a couple of things briefly. Number one, USTR is the coordinator or trade policy within the United States government. People like to demonize USTR but we have elaborate process in all the involved agencies. The environmental agencies, the health agencies, labor, economic agencies, work together to develop the policies that we take abroad. Second, I agree that invasive species is an enormous problem. Globally and in the United States. And we have to do things about it. But is the answer to close our borders completely? No. Dan Seligman: Nor is that what I said. Jennifer Haverkamp: No, its not what you said. But, trade is one of many pathways by which invasive species come in. We need to look at carefully how to do those. But when there are situations of concern, the trade rules aren’t what say you have to bring things in, or that you can’t keep things out. You just have to have a good reason for doing so, so that its not protectionist. And the Asian Longhorn Beetle example, we have rules in place, we’re keeping out Chinese packing material that is not now heat treated or otherwise treated to kill those things. There’s not a WTO case brought by Hong Kong saying that you can’t do that. They’ve accepted that. They’ve imposed a requirement to keep out another pest from the United States, and we’re complying with that. And not challenging it. So invasive species are an enormous problem but I don’t see the same level at risk that you do that the trade rules will prevent us from dealing with that. There’s a big inter agency task force, an executive order, trying to come up with a US management plan on invasive species. And we will participate in that process, because its, you know, an enormous problem. But I don’t, we’ll look and see if there are particular trade problems that come up, but I would like, I guess at some time later to talk more about the specific concerns you have about specific APHIS activity. Scott Miller: Let me interrupt here, because I want to give people time to ask questions. First of all the rules of the game are that working journalists have first priority, those are the people wearing the blue tags. And secondly, questions, not speeches. If you have a question, please ask it. If you have an opinion to start, lets talk about that afterwards, but we really want to have this be a dialogue for questions. That being said lets start in the from here. Cheryl? Question: I’m Cheryl Hogue with Chemical and Engineering News, and…. I wanted to follow up a little bit on the persistent organic pollutants question, that Dan brought up. And I was wondering if you could address some of that, Jennifer: Is USTR involved at all in the interagency process for the US negotiations for this UN treaty which will be completed in December? And if so, what is your role? Jennifer Haverkamp: We play a role in various international environmental agreement negotiations where there are trade implications. State runs the process, again big inter-agency team, we are one of the agencies on that team. And we do have someone participating in the POPs discussions. There are questions about whether trade measures are a good way to help enforce some of the actions of this agreement, and particularly the questions about whether parties to that agreement can keep out products from non-parties, and if so in what circumstances. And we have been participating in that process to figure out what an appropriate trade component of this agreement on it to be. ….I’m not personally familiar with a lot of the details of that negotiation to know where all trade constraints may be coming into the negotiation. I think there’s certainly plans for parties to the agreement to ban trade amongst themselves, except for certain essential uses. I think a good example of this is DDT I think is one of these POPs. But in certain countries it is considered still the best way to deal with malaria, when its used in certain ways. So do we ban all trade in DDT or not. And so, we’re part of that process. But I think what Dan was alluding to was an issue that’s called the savings clause issue. And I haven’t heard anyone in the US government looking for, talking at in that negotiation about whether a savings clause would be appropriate in that case. I think Australia’s interested in one. But there’s a lot of misunderstanding about what savings clauses are for. NGOs in Europe in particular like to call them WTO supremacy clauses. What they’re supposed to be, they used to historically just be something that lawyers did at the end of a negotiation to clarify the intent of the negotiators. And the point of them is, in a new international agreement, if you intend to modify your obligations under some other international agreement, that’s fine. And the US position is, if we feel that in a particular negotiation that its important to deviate from our obligations and other agreements, be they trade or other kinds of agreements, to achieve the objectives of that agreement, do it. But if the intent of the negotiators is not to modify…. (break in tape) …..confusion on that point, then its just good governance to clarify that in a savings clause. And they’re actually quite routine provisions in international agreements. And so, yes we advocated a savings clause in something called the Bio-Safety Protocol, because we repeatedly asked the other countries negotiating that agreement, is anybody trying to modify their WTO obligations in this agreement. And they all said no no no we’re not. And so, we put in a savings clause. Dan Seligman: But if I may follow up, the effect of these savings clauses is, of course, make WTO rules trump those of the environmental convention when it comes to anything having to do with trade. Be it trade sanctions to enforce the environmental agreement, or mechanisms to mitigate the environmental harm by controlling the flow of dangerous chemical or product or whatever they’re trying to regulate. So, from our perspective, the supremacy clause is not a routine judgment. Under the WTO rules, its highly ambiguous what the status of international environmental agreements is with respect to the WTO. Our view is that US government is resolving that ambiguity in favor of the anti-environmental World Trade Organization rules. If I may just follow up on the APHIS debate a little bit…just the point then, this is an interesting thing. POPs are very dangerous. They have a long history in the Great Lakes of causing all sorts of development abnormalities in animals and fish and so forth, birds in particular. Again, this is an issue that can only be resolved at the global level and the interesting fact here is that the USTR, on behalf of the US government, is a very active player in defining the terms of this global treaty that’s going to affect the quality of life, as I said, right here. Its an interesting thing that I think merits some public scrutiny. Scott Miller: Another example of how global trade issues can be local stories. I think everybody would agree with that. Question: It seems that the US government is setting up trade as the bottom line fundamental policy value by which all other values are to be judged, and I’m wondering why shouldn’t governments restrict trade, simply for the purpose of restricting trade, meaning just to put an example: why shouldn’t Japan say that maintaining they’re apple production has cultural value beyond its value to consumers, and that alone is grounds for restricting trade, so that they’re apple production isn’t devastated by cheaper imports from the US? Jennifer Haverkamp: When you look at the history of trade negotiations, trade agreements there has always been an understanding and expectation that countries can protect certain sectors if they want to, that they can phase in their changes in their obligations over time if they feel that’s necessary. The whole nature of a trade negotiation is countries who are participating in the negotiation because they presumable believe that trade liberalization is in their national interest, but they want to negotiate about when and how, and how they get more access to the other market while protecting their own market. And over time, the history of the trading system, I think, has positively demonstrated that its in the overall economic interest of the countries in those negotiations to lower their tariffs. It also has been very beneficial not just for our export interests but our consumers. Its created enormous choices, lowered the cost of products, its increased the standard of living for Americans. A third of our manufacturing goes to exports so its created lots of jobs and prosperity in this country. There are lots of reasons we and other countries have decided that we think that trade liberalization is good for us. But that isn’t to say that countries can’t decide to reserve certain sectors. We have certain restrictions that we have never negotiated away, or are very slow to negotiate away. Tariffs and quotas and textiles, things like that. But when you see a dispute like this its because countries feel that when they entered into a negotiation and were making their deals over what they would give up, our view is Japan was agreeing to a system that would open up their market to our apples, and they were using coddlingwads as an excuse not to comply with what they had negotiated. Dan Seligman: …This question of the Japanese and whether they should be allowed to protect their small apple growers from Washington State apple growers. I think that Jennifer’s answer, in all honestly, ignores the real politique of trade negotiations. The United States remains the worlds biggest market. Colossal riches are available to get into our market. The only way really to participate in the system of trade is to become part of a trade agreement, which in our view, the US is the primary force in setting the terms of. And so, the other thing about trade agreements is that, especially the Uruguay round of agreements that establish the WTO, is that there are a huge collection of rules with all sorts of trade-offs bared in them. So a country may in fact sign on to them, because it wants some of the parts of it but realizes there are great costs to it in accepting all of it. Because its an all or nothing kind of arrangement, because of the power of the United States, they in fact do have to sign on to these things whether or not they’re in the best interest of all parts of their economy and society. Question: …Does USTR put out a regulatory agenda, a list of upcoming trade negotiations. I’ve had a struggle of a time trying to follow things like APEC, the Asian-Pacific negotiations… I find out about it in funny ways and I’m wondering if I’m going about it all wrong….? Jennifer Haverkamp: We don’t put out a regular list as far as I know. A lot of things go up on our website about what we do. And we just, frankly, probably just a month or two ago, we think greatly improved our website and hope that its much more useful than it used to be. But, we’re very small, we’re like 160 people. We have a budget of like $25 million, and almost all of that goes to salaries, so even having a good website has been a big resource struggle. Scott Miller: What’s your URL, as long as we’re talking about it? Do you know what the website address is? Jennifer Haverkamp: www.ustr.gov. But I think part of the problem that you probably have, that we also have, is that its not always obvious to people who have a traditional trade mentality which issue is going to be of interest to the environmental community. So the trade negotiations we negotiate, yeah there can be environmental dimensions to them, and then we participate in some of the other processes going on in other parts of the US government. But we don’t have, if I am understanding your question, we don’t sort of self-identify environmental issues. Questioner: …Which environmental, or suppose other reporters have interest in labor concerns, other reporters… Jennifer Haverkamp: Or intellectual property rights. Scott Miller: There’s no agenda for these meetings, you just know that the meetings are taking place. Questioner: … to figure out whose on what delegation, if its an air issue, if it’s a water issue. And it feels totally inefficient from my perspective, and I would appreciate any guidance on how to do this better. Jennifer Haverkamp: There are a couple of things. One thing is that we now have a monthly briefing for the NGO community on, I think it’s the first Wednesday of every month. I don’t know… Questioner: Are reporters invited? Jennifer Haverkamp: I don’t know. And maybe that’s part of the problem, is that we need to find other ways to talk to you guys better. Probably talking to the environmental agencies about what issues they think are of interest to them that we do is a good way. And you should feel free to also call our press office. I don’t know if you tried and that hasn’t worked. But we are trying to improve that part of our work. Scott Miller: Let me just ask. Dan, are there any other resources that reporters should be aware of that might help them track, just from a purely, almost a scheduling function, which issues are current before open rounds of negotiations? Dan Seligman: Well that’s, talk to Jennifer about that. But just as a general matter, the things that are going to be hot this year are the free trade area of the Americas, which is supposedly going to be a draft of that treaty. And basically from our perspective it’s a super-NAFTA. It presumably will have many of the principles of the NAFTA. And we’re concerned, of course, that its going to have, again, this ability built into it for corporations to sue governments for environmental laws in the public interest. There’s a suit brought against the California law, this is a major major environmental issue. Its colossally important. It needs to be written about everywhere. Under NAFTA rules, for the clean water rule in California, and again its possible although far from certain that these same rules will be built into the free trade areas of the Americas with the view toward making them global. And there was a trade association, the US Council for International Business, whose agenda it is to create global takings rules. That would have a devastating impact on environmental protection everywhere. Question: This has to do with the case with Ethol corporation. …Canadian government scientists, US government scientists that recognize…its highly neuro-toxic…the question has to do with the current rules that are in NAFTA, I think are fully inadequate from an environmental point of view… the government tries to protect its own people. It seems like the right of the corporation to make a profit is higher than… able to address those issues, that you know of right now. Jennifer Haverkamp: For the rest of the audience, he’s addressing a question that’s very much come up in the NAFTA, what are called Chapter 11, which is the investment chapter of NAFTA, where an investor in one country can take to arbitration the host government if they feel that their property has been expropriated. Expropriation as a general concept has been around forever. Country nationalizes the particular industry and seizes the property. Do you get to be compensated for that? Whats come up very much recently in some of these cases under NAFTA is a parallel, as Dan says, to the debate over regulatory takings here in our domestic courts. Which is: can, and if so when can regulatory actions by governments constitute an expropriation. And the US, Canadian and Mexican governments are very much aware of this issue in trying to figure out what to do about it. The Ethol case that you mentioned, in fact Canada settled that government with the Ethol corporation after they lost a domestic court case because it was considered a violation of their inter-provincial agreements. But there’s the Metalclad case that came down, the Methanex case you referred to. This is something that we’re following closely and the US government has been working on. Is there a way to clarify these rules to better address the uncertainties out there so that the process internationally tracks the way that regulatory takings are addressed in this country. And we’ve had some three-country discussions about that, and are hoping to reinvigorate that process. Question: Jennifer, you said something at the outset about trying to increase the transparency of WTO. I’d like you to explain that. My understanding is that WTO is a closed book at the moment. There are no observers allowed, there are no public processes, and the US doesn’t have the kind of leverage that it had over, for instance the World Bank, in that the World Bank was dependant on US Congress to appropriate money for it. Nor does the US have a veto at WTO. So what leverage do you have? Jennifer Haverkamp: Well, it is… sometimes vehemently disagree whether it’s a democratic institution or not, but it is a consensus-based institution, where countries have to reach agreement in order to go forward on changes. And so we don’t have a veto, we don’t have an absolute right to get our way on the transparency issues. But we have been pushing them very hard and making some progress. Not enough yet. We just I think a week or two ago put out a paper, there’s a debate going on in the WTO general council now on how to improve transparency and we tabled a paper with a lot of specific suggestions that you can find on our website. Canada tabled a paper too that is in line with some of the proposals that we’re pushing. The EU is actually doing something. And the EU, frankly, has been, and Canada both, have been consistent to several of the initiatives that we’re pushing in the WTO. What we’re trying to do is in the disputes, open them to observation by the public, create a mechanism for the filing of the amicus briefs, make all the documents public, and we propose in this paper we tabled that we start to open up some of the meetings of WTO committees, even if its just be web casting. Looking for ways to take advantage of the electronic improvements and to help other countries get more comfortable with the idea. The WTO was an institution that was basically governments talking to each other, about the gap that preceded it. And there’s a lot more that needs to be done to open it up. At the same time, there is enormous resistance from other countries to this agenda. And as the way some of them have explained it to us, its part of the sort of developed/developing country imbalance they feel generally about the institution. Developing countries feel that developed countries have too much say, and they feel that opening this up will just give, effectively, developed countries more say because it’s the developed country NGOs who have the sophistication and the resources to actively take advantage of the improvements. And so, that’s a reason that they really are resisting it. That said, there have been improvements over the last year since the WTO was created. Their website is actually pretty good. We in ’96 got the presumption about documents flipped so that the presumption is that they are derestricted, not all of them soon enough. But the initial presumption used to be everything was a restricted document. Even a paper you table yourself was a restricted document unless the WTO agreed to derestrict it. So there are a lot of changes, a lot more stuff is available. The secretariat has, on their own initiative, starting to have a lot more meetings, symposia, putting out newsletters. They on their own initiative came out with a newsletter that basically described everything that happened in the meetings on the committee on trade and environment. So stuff like that is happening but not enough yet. But there is a lot of resistance from other countries to that agenda. We’re hoping that the new government in Mexico will help change things, because Mexico has been one of the biggest roadblocks to a transparency agenda in all the fora we operate in together. Scott Miller: This is an important issue and let me, Dan I know you want to respond, but let me lead into your response this way. Can the United States be an agent for positive change within this organization if we remain engaged with WTO, or is there a danger, if we don’t, if we’re not actively at the table, that WTO would be even worse than it is now in terms of being an open process? Dan Seligman: That’s an interesting question. Obviously the US is going to remain engaged with the WTO. I don’t think there’s strong political will to pull out of it. In many ways I consider the United States to have been the main engineer, an architect of the World Trade Organization. The US and the industry that benefits from it. But my concern is that, in many respects, the US isn’t the best messenger for transparency and democracy in the WTO because in all honesty our own trade policy and the formulation of it is often done under a cloak of secrecy. Just to cite one example, before trade problems with let’s say another country’s regulations rise to the level of a formal dispute, there are often a lot of informal conversations that occur between governments about new regulations that are under development, and their trade consistency. And just one example, Europe was recently developing a regulation requiring the recycling of computers. Computers are basically plastic boxes filled with toxic materials, a lot of lead and cadmium and so forth. When they’re taken off your desk, by and large in the United States and Europe, they’re just thrown into a landfill, where those toxic materials enter the environment. Europe was trying to do something about this by requiring recycling, and reduction of some of the toxic materials in computers. At the behest of the American Electronics Association, the US government intervened in that regulatory process, with an intervention that on its face appeared to be trying to kill the initiative altogether. Subsequently it was softened, but some of the interventions were as if they’d been written by the American Electronics Association, their arguments and the AEA brief to the government which were leaked to us, were tracked very very closely with the arguments in the US government position. That happened, the US government took a position in Europe, attacking this worthy initiative, without ever consulting the public, without ever asking environmentalists what they thought. So I think that there’s a culture of secrecy that’s born of the diplomatic origins of trade negotiations, they were originally conceived as a diplomatic exercise. But there’s cultural secrecy that shrouds trade policy, and as trade policy becomes more regulatory in nature, as it starts to affect core non-trade values, its got to open up. And I think that opening up, the US would be a much more credible messenger in its advocacy in its opening of the WTO as our own trade policy becomes more open. In fact there have been some steps in Seattle which we can talk about that are positive. Question: I wasn’t at WTO but I talked to people who were there and who support people who support those people. And one thing that I’ve understood and I wondered if I could, kinda of a two-fold question. My first question is what your response to this is, that these aren’t people who are necessarily are thinking along the same lines as the government people who just automatically think trade negotiations. But what they’re concerned about is one world which is good in many ways, but being controlled by profit as the profit making corporations above and beyond their own democracies. To bring it to a Great Lakes issue, which is the area that I specialize in, this is something that I think is coming and that we’re going to hear more and more about. I’ve noticed that there are several other sessions about water diversions. But when they were holding hearings about water diversions because a company was wanting to ship Lake Superior water out, are we going to be seeing Great Lakes fresh water, 20% of the world’s fresh water, as a commodity that cannot be controlled, because it is a commodity and therefore we can’t… Scott Miller: Okay, does WTO weaken our own control over our own vital natural resources like the Great Lakes?… Jennifer Haverkamp: The bulk water transfer issue is a significant issue. The trade rules are not going to compel anybody to make bulk water removals and ship it abroad. The natural resources such as water have been controlled for as long as I can think of, since 1908 or so by international institutions, like the International Joint Commission, things like that, pacts among countries. The trade rules don’t say you have to remove your water and sell it to other countries, they just don’t. And countries all have their own natural resources, if they want control over how they manage. And so its really hard for us to imagine a government bringing a challenge against another government to try to compel it to do that. I’m not sure what the trend hook would be. That said, if you bottle water and turn it into a commercially traded good then some of the trade rules that apply to trade in goods apply. But bulk water isn’t a traded good under the trade conditions of the trade rule. Dan Seligman: This is not an issue that I follow very closely, but there are folks who do that I can put you in touch with, anybody who wants to write about it. But here’s my understanding of how it works, and I could be mistaken. Under the services agreement of the WTO, if you have a natural resources commodity, that is ever at an point enters into private commerce, in other words if you lets say give a domestic private corporation the right to trade in, or provide services for the shipment of bulk water. Then you have to open that sector on a competitive basis to all commerce, to all private industry no matter where they come from. And so the concern here, you’re right that the, in my understanding, the trade agreements don’t force the privatization of natural resources. But what they do is create the potential to vastly increase the scale of resource exploitation if well-capitalized foreign firms are able to then get access to a resource because you as a third world country have given one private concessionaire some access to that resource. Then everybody gets access. There was a case in Brazil, this was a Wall Street Journal story a couple of years ago, where the Brazilian government had historically given mining concessions only to national companies. I think that would be illegal under the WTO. But they arbitrarily on their own, before these negotiations were completed, gave foreign concessionaires equal access to their mining industry. In the space of one year, mining investment for gold leaped from about $15 million a year to about $1.5 billion per year. All that gold lies under the Amazon basin. You can imagine whats going to happen as American Barrick and Felpes Dodge are now moving in. So, with this issue area, it’s the scale of resource exploitation that I think is the primary concern. Up to Top HOME | Email Signup | About Us | Contact Us | Terms of Use | © 2008 Sierra Club |
