TRADE-EU: Sustainability Assessment Draws Cautious Response

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Brian Kenety

BRUSSELS, Feb 25 2000 (IPS) - The decision by the European Union (EU) to commission a comprehensive Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA) of negotiations at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has drawn a cautious response from Non Governmental Organisations, NGO’s.

The NGO’s say they fear the initiative will wither on the vine as a purely ‘academic’ exercise.

Last November, contractors from the University of Manchester, in England, completed the first of three phases in the SIA. This was in time for consideration by European policymakers prior to the WTO third ministerial conference in the United States city of Seattle.

During Phase I of the SIA (literature review and preparation of methodology), the contractors studied current economic, environmental and social development impact assessment techniques.

They created an assessment methodology which, they say, ‘constitutes a major development in the field of impact assessments of international trade policy.”

In Phase II (application of the SIA methodology), the contractors then carried out a qualitative assessment of the impact upon sustainability of the EU’s WTO trade round agenda.

A 150-page study outlining these findings was presented on Feb 23 at a public meeting in Brussels.

In a joint statement released during this presentation, some 40 NGOs, including European branches of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Friends of the Earth, and Oxfam, welcomed the SIA as an essential first step in ‘generating new thinking and new approaches’ in fashioning coherent and sustainable trade, development, and environmental policies.

It is important for the EU member states and their executive arm, the European Commission (EC), “to develop a common methodology for SIAs, as these will inevitably become essential for improving transparency and accountability in EU trade policy- making,” they said.

“Being the first time that the sustainability impacts of an international trade agreement have been reviewed in the EU, we recognise the efforts made by the Commission to overcome the inherent complexity of such an undertaking,” read the statement.

At the conclusion of Phase I – and prior to the collapse of WTO talks in Seattle – EU trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy said the SIA was an important tool to help “harness WTO-led liberalisation to ensure that it brings positive benefits in terms of economic growth, social development and environmental protection for all WTO members.”

However, Miguel Insausti of the WWF European Policy Office, who spoke on behalf of the signatories to the NGO joint statement, told IPS that as SIAs are still not mandatory at either the European level, and are often done on an ad hoc basis subject to the political winds, the danger remains that the study will be a “academic exercise” or a “public relations” effort.

“We haven’t seen a clear signal how the (EU institutions) will use the SIAs, or whether they have used fully the tools and resources at their disposal” in the past, he said.

Insausti said that while directorates of the Commission had carried out impact assessments, generally as relates to the environment, “they don’t dream of assessing policy, which is a much broader (concept) than individual programmes.”

He said that the Feb 23 consultation was very useful, allowing for a quite detailed discussion on the methodology of the University of Manchester’s SIA and for NGOs to stress that EU policy must reflect some of its findings, but was disappointed that few EU officials were on hand to contribute to the debate.

The WWF European Policy Office, together with Oxfam GB, Save the Children, will send a full critique of the SIA to Lamy and the Commissioners for Development and Environment at the end of next week.

In their joint statement, the 40-plus NGOs said that to date, the ‘Commission’s SIA has not been effectively deployed to inform and foster inter-departmental discussions in any significant way, let alone to mobilise all the necessary expertise within the Commission (including environment, development, agriculture, fisheries, trade and other officials).”

They also charged that neither the elected EU body, the European Parliament, nor the member states have been involved in the SIA process ‘with a view to informing national debates on policy making,’ meaning that an essentially reactionary stance had been adopted: cure, rather than prevention of ills.

The NGOs are calling on the European institutions to commit resources to review the impact of the existing Uruguay Round Agreements of the WTO, including their effects on the environment, poverty, development, human rights, gender equity, marginalised communities and democracy.

Furthermore, they want SIAs to be mandatory for any bilateral, regional or multilateral trade agreement in which the EU is involved “by institutionalising the SIA practice in EU trade policy-making, and establishing concrete mechanisms for learning from SIAs to inform policy development.”

The contractors broke down possible impacts of EU policies into three basic categories – economic, environmental and social – and presented numerous tables showing both the positive and negative potential sustainability impacts of various measures, on four groups of countries; the European Union member states, developing countries, least developed countries (LDCs), and the world as a whole.

The measures the contractors considered included those concerned with agriculture, services, investment, competition, environment, labour standards and technical barriers to trade.

In agriculture, for example, the SIA found “significant economic, social and environmental impacts are associated with each of the three scenarios (based on actual EU policy)… There are considerable differences in the significance of impacts within target groups.”

But at times participants in the public discussion this week seemed disappointed with the lack of case studies presented by the contractors, Colin Kirkpatrick and Norman Lee, both economists with the Institute for Development Policy and Management and Environmental Impact Assessment Centre in Manchester.

Insausti of the WWF, said that the contractors “jumped from indicators to conclusions” without clearly showing how these findings were reached.

However, Lee stressed that the “appraisal is a process leading into a process – you don’t deliver it all at one time with a view towards an outcome.”

Both he and Kirkpatrick stressed that at all phases of the SIA project they welcomed input from civil society and other groups.