by Lori Wallach
Public Citizen Global Trade Watch Director

People who care about animal welfare and wildlife conversation were among the first to experience the rude awakening that today’s “trade” agreements were not mainly about trade, but rather posed a major threat to an array of environmental, animal welfare, consumer health and safety and values and policies. Today, as the ongoing World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations focus on special “sectoral” negotiations on fisheries and timber, the threat to critters and their habitats is about to get much worse unless we organize to derail this retrograde agenda.

We dubbed the 1991 ruling by a secretive panel established under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that the U.S. had to change or eliminate the Marine Mammal Protection Act the case of GATTzilla ate Flipper to bring home the threat lurking under the seemingly distant, technical “trade” pacts that were then being negotiated. At stake was the transformation of the GATT, a system under which the U.S. could and did block such an extreme ruling, into a new powerful global commerce agency the WTO. In parallel, negotiations had started on an even more virulent delivery mechanism for the same “corporate globalization”, deregulation regime between the U.S., Mexico and Canada called NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement.

After the shocking 1991 dolphin case, many animal welfare groups took a lead in the ensuring U.S. 1990s congressional battles to stop approval of the WTO and NAFTA. These national debates, in which an array of powerful corporate interests steamrollered the retrograde “trade” deals into existence, began to raise public and congressional awareness that at stake was a pervasive new threat to U.S. and international animal and environmental protection policies.

Instead of being limited to traditional trade matters, such as tariffs and quotas, these new “trade” pacts set an array of constraints and one-size-fits-all backwards rules on non-trade issues, to which all countries are required to confirm their domestic policies at the threat of costly trade sanctions. In this regime, animals are considered “goods” as are trees and other aspects of nature. The activities relating to the harvest, processing, transport, marketing or sale of such goods are regulated under these pacts as “services.” Thus, WTO, NAFTA and their various clones forbid both certain domestic policies banning sale of certain goods (for instance sale of meat slaughtered in an inhumane manner) and policies requiring that foreign firms operating within our country follow policies relating to certain processes, such as regarding how they mine ores here or limits on toxic waste incineration or zoning rules that might limit factory farm operations or big box retailers. In trade terms, timber is a “good” and forestry is a “service” and how we regulate both is now constrained by International commercial rules imposed top-down by these agreements.

The 1999 WTO ministerial in Seattle, during which the world watched “turtles and teamsters” marching in protest together, highlighted the direct hit that animal welfare and wildlife conversation policies were taking under the WTO. By 1999, we had seen four and a half years of the WTO, and four new WTO disputes that led to the weakening of laws put in place to protect both animal welfare and the environment. In one instance, the Clinton administration heavily lobbied Congress to amend the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which forbid the sale in the U.S. of tuna caught by domestic or foreign fisheries using techniques that had killed hundreds of thousands of dolphins, because Mexico had used the powerful new WTO to threaten a new case against the U.S. refusing to gut the law as the GATT has requested.  Another WTO ruling ordered the U.S. to weaken the regulations under the Endangered Species Act banning shrimp caught using techniques that killed engendered sea turtles and the Clinton Administration weakened the policy. A U.S. WTO threat against European bans on furs caught using violent steel leg-hold traps resulted in that policy being gutted. A successful WTO challenge against U.S. Clean Air Act regulations on gasoline contaminant also resulted in those rules being weakened.

Meanwhile, the agriculture rules found in both the WTO, NAFTA and now more recent NAFTA clone-agreements, such as the Central American Free Trade agreement (CAFTA) promote the intensification and spread worldwide of the factory farm model. Communities seeking to counter the brutal factory farm system, with its documented abuse of animals in massive consolidated livestock operations and its wipe out of small farmers and consolidation of livestock production are finding the laws they pass locally are being attacked as “trade” illegal – even though they apply to local, domestic conduct rather than trade in anything. Indeed, WTO, NAFTA, CAFTA and the entire alphabet soup of “trade” agreement that deliver the corporate globalization system explicitly forbid the consideration of the processes of how animals are raised or how fish are harvested. Under these pacts, “process and production” standards, such as animal welfare laws or sustainable fishing rules, are dubbed “illegal discrimination” even through they threat domestic and foreign products the same.

If this isn’t troubling enough, recently passed trade agreements, like CAFTA, a six-nation expansion of NAFTA to Costa Rica, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua,  will make the situation worse. CAFTA’s service sector rules gave away countries” control over marine exclusive boundaries -- meaning Central American countries” laws limiting off-shore drilling and factory shop fishing in territorial waters are illegal under CAFTA except in Costa Rica which took an exception. Moreover, as under CAFTA, laws limiting or forbidding beachfront development are illegal, the rise of hotels and tourism is likely to devastate remaining marine habitats.  CAFTA also excludes even the very limited clause in NAFTA that gave precedence to certain Multilateral Environmental Agreements, including the vital Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES), when there is a conflict.

Unfortunately, since the landmark Public Citizen litigation in the early 1990s, which got environmental and animal welfare groups included in the official U.S. trade advisory system, the sorts of provisions being included in these “trade” agreements have only gotten more anti-critter and anti-habitat.  How can we change this race to the bottom: only by more intense campaigning to increase the accountability on U.S. trade policymakers in Congress and the Administration.

Now a new chance to do just that is arising.

Negotiations dubbed “the WTO Doha Round” are now underway on a subject innocuously called “non-agriculture market access (NAMA).” But these are anything but benign. They are aiming at 100 percent liberalization and deregulation of fisheries, forest products and minerals – meaning removing all of the tariffs now somewhat limiting the volume of trade in these sensitive products and eliminating what in WTO jargon are called “non-tariff barriers.” What corporate globalizers call non-tariff barriers we all think of as the basic regulatory policies protecting species and habitats, such as bans on “curtain of death” drift nets, bans on tropical or raw log exports and more. While the disastrous effects of over-fishing and the destroying of vital habitat for wildlife have been clearly documented, these on-going WTO negotiations are aimed at   gutting the very policies that countries use to prevent the destruction of habitats and species.

Why can we make a difference now? Because after a decade of the WTO-NAFTA model in effect, the results have shifted the political dynamic dramatically.

Not only have these agreements proved to be an enormous threat to the principle and practice of democracy – and the environmental and other laws and policies we have won using the democratic process – but they have failed on their core promised benefit. Not only have the promised economic gains now materialized from these deals, but in fact conditions for most people worldwide have deteriorated under the corporate globalization regime as measured by the growing rate of hunger worldwide and the increased number of people living in $2 per day abject poverty. Even in rich countries, such as the U.S., this model has proved a dangerous failure. Today, after the loss of 3 million (one out of six) U.S. manufacturing jobs, our median real wage level has fallen to 1972 levels and even WTO-loving economists admit that at least one-third of dramatically-increased U.S. income inequality is due to trade liberalization’s inexorable race-to-the-bottom in wage levels. The U.S. now faces a trade deficit that is larger each month than the annual deficits before WTO and NAFTA, with the projected $700 billion 2005 deficit widely recognized to be slowing U.S. growth rates and threatening worldwide economic stability. Meanwhile, for the first time since the 1950s, this year the U.S. is a net importer of food!

The only way to change this dire situation for our children’s economic futures, for our national security and world stability (threatened increasingly as developing countries’ globalization-caused economic disaster is causing massive social breakdown and desperation) and the future of the animal and habitats necessary for our very survival is to increase our fight. Only if animal activists join the broad array of others who are rejecting the “trade” status quo and demanding alternatives, and make their issues and problems politically necessary to deal with will there be change.

To get involved in the WTO fights today and to join the battle against the service sector globalization talks, check out the Public Citizen Global Trade Watch website at www.tradewatch.org.