India Opposes Move To Link Environment And Trade

India is strongly opposing creeping efforts to link environment and labour standards to trade at a UN-sponsored summit to review the state of the world, five years after the Rio Earth Summit.

The draft action programme for global action on sustainable developments hints at the possibility of a multilateral framework on investment and would make international labour and environmental standards mandatory for developing nations.

India, along with Indonesia and supported by the G-77 developing nations and China, is resisting the effort.

India will not accept the introduction of new issues, Indian minister for environment and forests Saifuddin Soz told the General Assembly.

 

It is a matter of grave concern that this forum is being used to reopen the distort the mandate and functioning of bodies such as the World Trade Organisation by seeking to legitimise the use of environmental considerations as visible and invisible trade barriers.

Soz maintained that issues such as labour standards and the relationship between trade and the environment were already being discussed in other international fora, and were not part of the original agenda at the Rio summit.

Instead, he said the summit should focus on a disappointing lack of ........ erode the framework for partnership built at Rio notably the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities - with efforts to prescribe equal obligations and liabilities on unequal players.

The Indian ministers statement was a clear reference to US reluctance to commit to a specific timetable in reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Although Europe is pushing for a commitment by the developed nations to reduce emissions to below 1990 levels by 2010, the US is signalling that it would sign on only if China and other developing nations also agree to meet the target.

The developing nations, however, are pushing for greater monetary and technological assistance from the indsutrialised countries before they commit to any such targets.

Said Soz, The emphasis will clearly need to be on time-bound commitments by industrialized countries for transfer of resources and of technology on non-commercial terms, since these are the crucial variables if the objectives of sustainable development are to be achieved.

At Rio, many developing countries had considered increased Official Development Assistance (ODA) as a natural trade-off for placing their industrial growth under stricter environmental regulations than the developed countries had while industrialising. Most donor countries had set a target of increasing their development aid to 0.7 per cent of their GDP as soon as possible.

Far from increasing, ODA shrunk from 0.33 per cent of the GDP in 1992 to 0.27 per cent in 1995. The developing countries are resisting attempts to set a timetable to meet the 0.7 per cent Rio goal.