Trade and the environment: what worries the developing countries?

• Author: Low, Patrick
• Position: Trade and the Environment

As pressure intensifies for global action to protect the environment, increasing numbers of developing-country governments will be confronted with demands that they adopt policies more sensitive to the environment and more mindful of the preservation of nonrenewable resources. Many such demands will be articulated in the first instance by foreign environmental groups and governments - only later, perhaps, becoming a significant focus of attention for local nongovernmental organizations, political parties and interest groups. Environmental quality is not yet a high-profile public policy issue in most developing countries.

The rights of nations to determine their own policies and priorities are being challenged in the environmental sphere because of the global dimension of many of today's environmental concerns, whereby one nation's activities may be perceived as affecting environmental quality in other countries. Such "global commons" issues range from depletion of the ozone layer, to localized soil and water pollution problems in border areas.

Whether the issue is management of natural resources in a sustainable manner, reducing industrial pollution, or protecting biodiversity, developing countries are increasingly having to respond to demands from industrial countries for modified behavior. But it is one thing for developing countries to accept the proposition that safeguarding the environment is a shared responsibility, and quite another to subscribe uncritically to environmental priorities and solutions framed in industrial countries. Five basic principles suggest themselves as useful guidelines within which to conduct the discussion of how industrial and developing countries should interact on environmental issues.

First, the definition of environmental "externalities" entails a political process as well as a scientific one, and this should be recognized. Politics enter the picture because, as with all policy-making, there are few absolutes in environmental policy-making - trade-offs must be made among competing objectives. What this means is that differences will almost certainly exist across countries as to the desirability of attaining given environmental standards. And even if environmental objectives were broadly shared by different governments, it does not follow that the same priority would be attached to the attainment of these objectives. Such diversity makes international uniformity of standards a problematic objective of...