Beyond Rio.

• Author: Esty, Daniel C.
• Position: Trade and the Environment

1. Introduction

   For two weeks last June, broadcasts from the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Brazil, focused the world's attention as never before on the environmental challenges we face on planet Earth.(1) Even now, a year later, the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), as the program in Rio was known formally, still shapes the public agenda for environmental protection and, equally important, for economic development.(2) Launched originally as a way of revisiting the issues raised at the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, the 1992 Rio Conference stands as a,watershed in global environmental protection, establishing new directions and priorities in environmental policy making.

   As time passes, the events at Rio will be much less remembered for the agreements produced(3) and much more remembered for the symbolic emergence of the environment as a global issue of first-order importance. By galvanizing representatives of more than 170 countries (including the presidents and prime ministers of more than 110 countries) around environmental concerns, the Earth Summit will be seen as a harbinger of a major redirection of the world's attention in a post-cold War era. in this new era, divisions along East-West lines diminish in significance and North,south divisions become predominant as the tensions between developed and developing countries in Rio showed.

   The Earth Summit will, moreover, be seen as establishing irrevocably the connection between environmental protection and economic growth. Indeed, it in now widely accepted that environmental concerns must be addressed in the context of development needs and economic growth efforts.(4) The lessons of Eastern Europe have been learned by ail.

   The Earth Summit will also be remembered for its democratization of international affairs and foreign policy. Never have representatives of so many nongovernment organizations (NGOs) attended a major international event, presenting such a broad array of views and perspectives. A short walk through the "Global Forum"' at Rio, organized to bring NGOs together, revealed a panoply of groups and interests that were in one way or another related to the issues of environment and development: from religious groups to the Solar Box Cookers Association to Women for the Environment in Africa.(5)

   Finally, and perhaps most important, the 1992 Earth Summit will be remembered for its remarkable role in worldwide environmental education. The 1972 Stockholm Conference served to educate governmental elites around the world about environmental issues.(6) In the months and years that followed, many countries set up environmental ministries, the United Nations Environment Programme began work in Nairobi, and some initial international environmental agreements were concluded, including the London Dumping Convention.(7) In contrast, Rio was an event of the masses. Not only did presidents and prime ministers have to read environmental briefing books on their long flights to Rio, but more significantly, discussions about environmental protection and its linkage to development were beamed by radio and television to every city, town, and village in the world. The delivery of the "environment and development" message into hundreds of millions of homes has left a mark that we will only begin to appreciate as time passes.

   While not every citizen of our planet became a committed environmentalist, almost every person on Earth knows more today about environmental concerns than they did before the Earth Summit. The reach of this environmental education became clear to me upon returning from Rio, when my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter asked me about "biodiversity."

2. A Rio Legacy

   The Rio process of integrating environmental and economic development goals has pushed the issue of trade to the fore in environmental policy making. For forty-five years, since the origin of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT),(8) trade and environmental policy makers worked on separate tracks with little intersection.(9) But beginning two years ago, as the integration of economic growth with environmental policies quickened(10) and the negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) began,(11) it became clear that trade policy could profoundly affect the environment. At that point, environmental groups, which had paid little attention to the negotiation of the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement, awakened to the prospect that free trade negotiations might have serious environmental implications that deserved their attention.(12) These issues came into sharp contrast in the context of the "fast-track" debate in the spring of 1991.(13)

   From the NAFTA discussions emerged four trade-and-environment issues. First, environmentalists complained that signing a free trade agreement with Mexico, a country much less developed than the United States, might result in downward "harmonization" of high U.S. environmental...