ASIA-PACIFIC: Growth Won’t Be Green Under APEC Free Trade

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Johanna Son

MANILA, Mar 22 1997 (IPS) - Free trade in the Asia-Pacific is likely to cause even greater damage to the enviornment as the economic growth of region’s economies accelerates.

East Asia’s economic power houses have enriched themselves at a heavy cost to nature, and it has long been evident that such growth is not sustainable.

The Bangkok-based Focus On The Global South, in a report for the ‘Rio Plus Five’ conference on the environment that ended Wednesday in Brazil, said free trade conflicts with long-term environmental concerns.

“The rapid industrialisation of the Asia-Pacific region has produced an environmental situation that can only be described as bordering on crisis,” said the report written by Walden Bello and Nicola Bullar of Focus.

Yet the governments of 18 Asia-Pacific economies are pursuing efforts to institutionalise free trade within the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum.

Formed in 1989, APEC spans North and Latin America to South- east Asia and Pacific and aims to tear down all barriers to trade and investment by the year 2020.

Its members are Australia, China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Brunei, Mexico, Chile, the US, Canada, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

APEC was meant to be a loose consultative forum aimed at discussing not only freeing up trade but pursuing technical and development cooperation. But pressures from the industrialised economies are pushing APEC to focus more on its free trade goal, despite doubts by developing member economies.

In the process the environment is not getting enough attention, despite rhetoric among APEC members about integrating “sustainable development” concerns in their discussions, said the report called ‘APEC And The Environment: A Report To The Rio +Five Conference’.

Focus concludes that APEC is an unlikely vehicle for nature- friendly growth, or for reconciling its aims of freer trade and investment with environmental protection..

“The body’s (APEC) commitment to preserving the environment in the Asia-Pacific is largely rhetorical and has not been backed up by effective programmes,” it said.

Most of East Asia’s tiger economies have paid a high price for their industrialisation in the last three decades, making their cities extreme health hazards.

South Korea’s industrialisation is largely responsible for filthy air in Seoul, which has one of the world’s highest sulphur dioxide levels. Focus cited studies showing that cancer rates have doubled in Taiwan since 1960 and that children in Bangkok have among the highest levels of lead in blood due to air pollution.

A large number of Asia’s rivers are degraded or dead, even as its capitals race to build the highest skyscrapers and the biggest shopping malls. In China, up to 30 percent of the agricultural land are degraded, lost to erosion or converted into urban real estate since the 1950s.

Deforestation remains a concern in many South-east Asian countries, and this year’s ‘State of the World’s Forests’ report says tropical Asia-Oceania still has the highest rates for forest loss at nearly one percent a year.

And as Asia strives to catch with the industrialised economies of the world, it is also producing more greenhouse gases. The region’s carbon dioxide emissions are expected to rise from the current 25 percent of global production to 36 percent by 2025.

Some of these concerns–from the liveability of cities to the state of the marine environment–were discussed in meetings leading up the 1996 APEC summit in the Philippines and endorsed by President Fidel Ramos, who was APEC chair last year.

At one point, Ramos said: “We finally stand on the threshold of unprecedented growth and change. That threshold–unless we watch our step and look when we cross–could very well be the brink of environmental disaster.”

The Manila Summit was dominated by trade concerns, but on a rhetorical level at least expressed hopes that growth could be sustainable.

However, these were only “nice words” and a subsequent blue print to spur APEC free trade revealed a gap between talk and

action.

Free trade remains the main driving force of APEC, but the organisation does not have a fixed forum for discussing the environmental impact of trade treaties.

Focus traces Asia’s environmental malady to its pursuit of the newly-industrialised country (NIC) development model, which was followed by the tiger economies and “places no investment in pollution control and externalises environmental costs”.

Finally, Focus argues that APEC’s potential for looking beyond free trade and investment is limited by the strong influence wielded by economic powers like the United States–for which the top priority is opening up Asian markets.

Says the report: “The failure of the North to come up with even a fraction of the cash to bankroll Agenda 21, which it agreed to in Rio five years ago, should forewarn us about entertaining any illusions about an APEC environmental Marshall Plan for the Asia-Pacific”.