TRADE-ENVIRONMENT: Green Code Doesn’t Satisfy NAFTA Critics

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Aug 5 1996 (IPS) - A green code of conduct being contemplated under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) will do nothing to help the people living in the shadow of the industrial assembly plants on Mexico’s border with the United States, critics say.

“We have great doubts about the near possibilities in implementing these kinds of commitments,” said Alejandro Villamar of the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade, which unsuccessfully opposed Mexico’s entry into NAFTA.

Villamar and others charge that Mexico has not enforced its anti-pollution standards in the maquiladora border region where many U.S. and Canadian manufacturers set up shop in order to escape their countries’ environmental laws.

The voluntary code, as discussed during an Aug. 1-2 meeting here, would call on business and governments in Canada, Mexico, and the United States to improve their standards voluntarily.

Recalling the just-ended Olympic Games in Atlanta, Canadian minister Sergio Marchi said that mere compliance with domestic environmental and public health requirements was insufficient.

“If the yardstick is lower than the one they’re used to in Canada and the United States, they should not take the consolation of high-jumping a lower bar,” he said. “They should move up the bar.”

The minister appeared to be responding to criticism by non- governmental organisations that NAFTA’s environmental side agreement has not prevented U.S. and Canadian companies from lowering their environmental standards when they operate in Mexico.

Even before the signing of NAFTA in 1994, opponents predicted that Mexico’s participation in free trade would encourage pressures for downward harmonisation of environmental regulations.

About 148 of the U.S. companies that have shifted to the maquiladora region have been tagged by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as relying on highly toxic substances in their production methods. Many are electronics and high technology enterprises.

Villamar notes that these U.S. manufacturers are not complying with decades-old Mexican environmental regulations that hazardous by-products be shipped out of Mexico.

The Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), a trinational environmental agency set up under the NAFTA side agreement, was meant to enforce existing regulations in all three countries. The CEC, however, has no power to force the governments to implement better environmental legislation.

And so far, with a staff of 30 people, the Montreal-based CEC appears to be limited to collecting information and making recommendations.

A North American Development Bank, set up with funding from all NAFTA governments to assist Mexico in the building of an environmental and urban infrastructure in its border areas, has after two years, only contributed to three small projects because of excessively strict commercial criteria, says Villamar.

Although the maquiladoras did not receive a mention by the three environment ministers at the end of what was the CEC’s third public forum here, Canadian environment minister Marchi said their communique covered environmental hot spots.

Marchi, along with EPA administrator Carol Browner in the United States, and Mexican Environment Minister Julia Carabias together head the CEC. They said the voluntary programme under development would ask governments and businesses to go beyond local regulations and achieve environment performance based on “the best practices in the public and private sectors”.

“This fits in quite nicely with (our) determination not to see the environmental standards weakened,” said Marchi.

In the first test of its legal muscle, the CEC has launched a probe into a port development project in Mexico. The CEC says it will investigate whether the Mexican government followed its own environmental review procedures when approving construction of a harbour and facilities in Cozumel.

Environmental groups in Mexico have complained that the initial approval of the project was confined to a pier in a narrow area, but that the project was later expanded without the proper environmental assessment.

Activists argue that the facilities, including harbours and hotels, will harm coral reefs.

Stewart Elgie, a lawyer with the Sierra Club Legal Defence Fund says that while the CEC’s announcements for a voluntary code of conduct and a probe of the Cozumel project are significant, they also reflect the NAFTA body’s major weakness.

“Yes, it is a first step towards ensuring environmental protection, but we don’t have yet in place guarantees that there will be tough environmental standards throughout North America,” he said.

He notes, for example, that while the three ministers have promised a plan to develop a strategy to safeguard endangered birds and the monarch butterfly, Canada has in place no legislation to protect any of the species.

“So when the monarch butterfly or other endangered species cross into Canadian territory, we are free to destroy their habitat or capture and harm the species with impunity,” says Elgie.