By Marty Logan
MONTREAL, Oct 14 2003 (IPS)

A review of the ‘green guardian’ of the North American Free Trade Agreement announced Tuesday will undoubtedly reveal flaws, but the decade-old system will likely be superior to the environmental protections included in the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and other future pacts, say experts.

A six-member review and assessment committee will probe the effectiveness of the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC), the environmental side accord to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed by Canada, Mexico and the United States in 1993.

The six independent committee members will also consider the work of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), which was set up to implement the NAAEC, said a media release from the organisation.

“What makes the CEC different from what’s under discussion now in the CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement) and the FTAA is that at least there is a commitment for a budget every year so you know what you are working with,” said Scott Vaughan, visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in Washington.

“The irony is that when they were negotiating NAFTA 10 years ago and the side agreement, it looked like (those) were going to be the point of departure and everything was going to get stronger from there. Now they look like they’re the high point and everything from there has gone downwards in terms of actually coordinating environmental policy and trade,” he added in an interview.

Negotiations towards the FTAA, a deal that would include 34 nations in the western hemisphere, are scheduled to continue in Miami in November, while Washington wants to sign the CAFTA with its five Central American partners in December.

“I think it’s a second-best solution because what it essentially allows governments to do is to sort of ‘ghetto-ise’ the environment and say ‘oh yeah, we’ve got a commission to deal with that’.”

He believes the NAAEC review should “come to the conclusion very rapidly that the CEC needs some more muscle and some more teeth. How it gets there, I don’t know, but that does mean much more input on the trade policy of the three countries.”

The review team is scheduled to produce a draft report for public comment before submitting its findings to the environment ministers of the three NAFTA countries in spring 2004.

Runnalls and Vaughan agree that the NAAEC has had successes, including pushing Mexico to improve its environmental protection practices.

“Is progress as rapid as one would like to see?” asked Runnalls. “No. Has Mexico become a haven for good environmental policy? No. Is it better than it was? Probably.”

“The mechanisms are there and the mechanisms are quite unique… I can’t think of another international agreement in which a citizen can go in and complain in front of his or her minister to two other ministers that this first minister isn’t doing his or her job properly,” he added.

Last December the CEC concluded that free trade had, on the whole, been good for the North American environment.

While its report found that NAFTA has had negative consequences, such as allowing companies to move polluting factories and ship industrial waste to jurisdictions with less stringent laws, it also said many new factories built in Mexico have better pollution abatement systems, and that NAFTA regulations forced the Mexican government to impose more stringent rules on pesticide use.

“While there is much more to know, it is clear that trade liberalisation accompanied by robust environmental policies can help achieve sustainable development – just as freer trade without adequate environmental safeguards can trigger degradation,” said Victor Shantora, acting executive director of the CEC.

“The key lesson is that policy matters,” he told IPS.

Vaughan called the CEC claim submissions process “probably the strongest legal and institutional model for public participation and transparency and governance from the bottom up”, but pointed out other shortcomings in the body’s operations.

“NGOs (non-governmental organisations) have been really concerned about NAFTA Chapter 11 issues involving the environment, and they repeatedly wrote to the CEC to ask for it to become involved in the environment-related expropriation cases under Chapter 11, but the CEC has no more access to the free trade commission than anybody off of the street.”

“As it’s supposed to be a side agreement to NAFTA, it doesn’t speak very well of its powers,” he added.

According to Runnalls, “the real problem for the CEC from the beginning is that none of the three countries has invested enough in it politically to make it work, even at the level of the environment ministers… This is an orphan. It’s got no political parents any more, and that has been its fundamental problem.”

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