ENVIRONMENT-TRADE: Environmentalists Fight Africa Trade Bill

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Danielle Knight

WASHINGTON, May 29 1998 (IPS) - U.S. Environmentalists are joining other non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the fight against a bill to promote U.S. trade and investment in Africa.

Since legislation on the “Africa Growth and Opportunity Act” passed the House of Representatives in March, many groups here have battled to prevent its passage through the Senate, the only obstacle to it becoming law.

Evironmentalists from the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth maintain that the bill will “undercut environment protection” and promote industries, such as mining, logging and export agriculture, which “threaten Africa’s ecosystems and small farmers.”

“This legislation would impose harsh new economic conditions on Sub-Saharan Africa, opening the region to exploitation by multinational resource corporations, but does nothing to ensure the sustainable development so urgently needed by the Africa people,” Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, wrote senators this week.

The bill – expected to be debated on the Senate floor in June – is designed to promote U.S. trade and investment in sub-Saharan Africa. Current economic ties between the United States and the countries in the sub-Saharan region are minimal; in 1996, U.S. exports to the regions came to just 6.1 billion dollars, or about one percent of total U.S. exports.

Imports from Africa amounted to 15.2 billion dollars, or about two percent of all U.S. imports. Most U.S. business with Africa involves only a few countries – mostly South Africa, Nigeria, and also Angola, Gabon, and Ghana.

Clinton – aiming to boost these numbers – promoted the bill during his trip in March to Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa and Senegal. Since then, trade and human rights groups along with environmentalists have called the plan a “de facto re- colonisation act.”

Even South Africa President Nelson Mandela denounced the bill as unacceptable. “This is a matter over which we have serious reservations,” he said during Clinton’s Africa visit.

Among other provisions, the bill expands the number of African products eligible for duty-free treatment under the Generalised System of Preferences by about 50 percent. These budget and tax cuts would reduce spending on environmental and health protection, says the Sierra Club’s Carl Pope.

“Without strong environmental safeguards, new foreign investment would likely follow the model established by such foreign companies as Royal Dutch Shell, whose oil drilling operations in Nigeria’s Ogoniland have caused wide-spread environmental devastation and are linked to egregious human rights abuses by the military government,” Pope wrote to senators.

Environmental organisations also have protested the eligibility requirements for countries wishing to benefit from the programme. Section four of the bill requires that the president determine each year that each participating country “does not engage in gross violations of international recognised human rights and has established or is making continual progress toward establishing a market-based economy.”

The bill sets out 12 points that determine compliance toward such progress. These include whether the country is reducing tariffs and other trade barriers, actively pursuing membership in the World Trade Organisation and complying with International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural adjustment programmes.

Implementing such measures could weaken environmental safeguards while increasing pressure on the environment from “uncontrolled economic activity,” say environmental groups.

“Investment liberalisation would, for instance, open the vast tropical rainforests of Central Africa to increased exploitation by well-capitalised foreign logging companies,” wrote Pope. “Deforestation rates in the region, which already exceed those of Brazil, would almost certainly rise as a consequence.”

Friends of the Earth, as part of an international environmental network including organisations in Benin, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Sierra Leone and Togo, says the bill would set in motion an environmentally destructive trade agreement between the United States and Africa based on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Environmental groups have accused that agreement, which links Canada, Mexico and the United States, of fostering a “race to the bottom,” where countries waive environmental laws or enforcement to attract foreign investment.

“We support U.S. government assistance and private trade and investment that furthers democracy and sustainable development in Africa nations, but (this bill) combines the worst aspects of anti- environment and anti-worker trade deals,” Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth wrote to policy makers in March, before the bill passed in the House of Representatives.

Other influential NGOs, including Transafrica and Public Citizen, are fighting another provision of the bill that would permit eligible countries to export textiles and apparel without quota and duty-free. The groups say that this would favour the interests of multinational companies and foreign investors at the expense of poor Africans.

While a section of the bill states that the United States shares an interest with Africa in “sustainable development,” environmentalists say the legislation does nothing to foster environmental protection, seen as a key to such development.

“The bill’s authors seem to assume that increased environmental protection will flow as an inevitable consequence from increased economic activity,” says Sierra Club’s Carl Pope. “Economic research shows that pollution tends to rise until countries reach a level of per capita income much higher that the income levels that are typical in Africa.”

Rather than foster sustainable development, Pope says the bill would “further deplete Africa’s natural capital of intact forests, clean air, and fertile soils, diminishing Africa’s prospects for generations to come.”