Where To Go After Johannesburg? Cancun or Bust!

by Victor Menotti

September 3rd, 2002

Buried in the Johannesburg Declaration is a short sentence affirming that the fate of almost every enforceable environmental agreement that the United Nations has produced since the original Stockholm conference will now be unilaterally decided by the World Trade Organization (WTO), whose next ministerial is in September 2003, in Cancun, Mexico..

Some people have wrongly understood that the autonomy of international environmental law was safely rescued from the jaws of the free trade fox by the recent removal of language in Paragraph 17 of the Trade Chapter calling for "WTO consistency". This deletion was truly a victory for efforts in damage control and needs to be claimed. But the following paragraph (18), which contains the document's only reference to multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) finds the UN bowing "in support of the work programme agreed through WTO." By agreeing to this text, Johannesburg has produced a cowardly reinforcement of the WTO's dangerously unbalanced Doha mandate.

Remember that, in Doha, governments mandated WTO to unilaterally clarify the relationship between trade rules and the trade measures that enforce MEAs. Negotiations are to take place under WTO auspices, with Trade, not Environment, Ministers leading negotiations, and where MEA Secretariats are given only "observer" status, apparently so they can watch while the treaties they administer are eviscerated. Doha also deemed that the outcomes "shall not add to or diminish the rights and obligations of Members under existing WTO agreements," which would seem to imply that, since no trade rules can be changed, then it can only be the MEAs that will be modified. If not modified, WTO might forge agreement among Members to enforce MEAs only in a "least trade restrictive" manner, which would effectively subordinate everything from Rio, as well as conventions on trade in toxic waste and endangered species, among others.

Governments should have used Johannesburg to introduce some balance into the WTO process by giving the UN an equal voice with WTO to reconcile the discrepancies between the international regimes governing trade and environment. The central concern here is "who decides?" And the answer to this question often determines the results. Letting the fate of the MEAs be decided by the trade body derides the very concept of checks and balances that is so central to good governance.

The greatest impact of Johannesburg is the destruction by governments of one of the few international institutions where civil society can be "for" something. Indeed, governments might never discuss sustainable development unless peoples' groups pressured them to take action. This relationship is different from what activists who spend their time fighting WTO/ IMF/WB often experience, who are accused of being always "against" everything and never saying what it is we "want". WTO's capture of this unique and strategic space in the international architecture forces civil society into only criticizing rather than proposing, and robs us of our forum for advancing alternatives.

WSSD's failure means that civil society's energy for building binding UN agreements to protect people and the planet must be taken to WTO. If the thousands of people who came to Johannesburg do not get directly involved in the growing global movement to challenge the WTO, there will be no meaningful voice to defend the MEAs as the WTO decides their fate. So, see You in Cancun!

Victor Menotti directs the IFG's Environment Program

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