India is losing the battle on environmental issues because we do so little at home

First, it is because we are just not serious about our negotiating position and take contradictory stands too often for anyone to believe us. Take the entire discussion on linking environment with trade. The Indian position has been to reject the idea at WTO. Quite right, we would argue. Environment is an unfair lever of power as it can only be used by the rich to discipline the poor.

On the other hand, environmental governance requires instruments which will check the environmentally-errant, industrialised North. How does Bangladesh — a poor country likely to suffer enormous damages because of the use of fossil fuels in the rich world — use trade sanctions to control greenhouse gas emissions of, say, the US?

But even while the ministry of commerce flexes its anti-environment and trade muscles in WTO, the ministry of environment and forests pushes for the same to be used in other global negotiations. For instance, India has been well-known for asking the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to use trade sanctions against countries trading in ivory or rhino horns.

Second, our negotiators believe in the strategy to block movement of ideas on the table — not to propose a new agenda. This means that we are successful in the short run, but as the other side continues to push and push, the ground keeps slipping under us.

Initially, WTO’s position was that importing countries have the freedom to choose their own standards in order to protect their own people’s health and their own country’s environment but they did not have the right to impose standards aimed at improving the health or environmental practices of exporting countries.

The latter would amount to a kind of “trade tyranny”and could well be used for economic protectionism. The open issue was if such standards could be imposed on exporting countries when a multilateral environmental treaty has been signed to this effect. It would have served our purpose to accept this provision and to firmly draw the line. But we adopted our time-honoured strategy of prevaricating. As a result, pressures on WTO from the environmental lobbies of the North have grown and the organisation has more or less caved in completely.

Just last month, the WTO’s appellate body decided in favour of the US in the famous case of the turtles verses the shrimps. WTO has accepted that the US was correct in taking unilateral action against another country — India, Malaysia and others — to protect the turtles, which it claimed were being killed in the process of harvesting shrimps.

It accepted the extra-jurisdictional action of the US saying that as “turtles are migratory species”, these animals must have been in US waters at some time. It has even accepted that trade can make a distinction between shrimps that are turtle-friendly (allowed to be imported) and those that are turtle-unfriendly (banned from imports). This destroys our position that trade cannot distinguish between products on the basis of the process used for production.

Third — and perhaps most important — we are losing the battle because we do so little at home. The Indian position is that the TRIPs agreement should be amended so that it includes geographical indicators for products other than spirits and wines. It would like products like Basmati or Darjeeling tea to be also granted this protection. Perfect. But, then, why on earth has it taken the Indian government since 1999 to get its domestic geographical appellation Bill ready?

Similarly, we say the TRIPs agreement must be made compatible to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) which recognises the need to protect and reward the knowledge of the poor, unlike TRIPs which only recognises the knowledge of the formal inventor.

But then, what does the government do? It sits and sits on its national bio-diversity Act, which would have provided the framework to force users of the knowledge — both Indian and foreign — to recognise the contribution of the poor knowledge holder. Worse, our draft bio-diversity Act is so unimaginative that it would do little to provide the bold framework needed to shake the “rich man” TRIPs agreement. It will be easier to flex our muscles if we are consistent and serious about what we want.

Commerce minister, Murasoli Maran says that WTO should not try and be a “global government”. But for that not to happen, Maran should also tell his prime minister and colleagues to start getting serious about the business of government.