Date published: 2005/03/02
The fourth lecture of the university's Third Annual Lecture Series in Sustainable Development (2005) was given today by Paul Ekins of the Policy Studies Institute, London. He classified himself as an environmental economist, so more on the policy than on the technology side of sustainable development.
He gave an overview of some of the issues to do with trade and the environment, but without offering any real way forward one way or the other. It is obvious that he falls more on the environment rather than the trade side of these issues.
He started with globalisation, which he said some people (read, economists) think of as "liberation" (so offering democracy, poverty eradication, etc.) and others (read, so-called environmentalists) think of as "enslavement" (corporate control, environmental degradation, etc.). (Well, now that Bush has started using the word "democracy" in every other sentence, it suddenly has a sinister meaning. But let's take the positive, traditional, meaning of that word here.) He claimed, as is the standard view, that globalism is more and more of a factor in the world.
He then talked about multilateralism. The issues here are the impact of such things as EU integration, the emerging developing country superpowers (China, India and Brazil), the nutty US administration pursuing its national interest, religious fundamentalism and international terrorism.
He then listed some of the obvious environmental problems: climate change, biodiversity, chemical pollution. He gave the usual line that we don't know, and may never know, the impact of these if allowed to continue as now, but by the time we do know the environmental degradation may be very costly and irreversible. He claimed the current situation was "unprecedented". Don't they always say that. Unfortunately you have to give a better argument than that something bad might happen unless you stop the world here and now (the so-called precautionary principle). If you can't give coherent quantitative analyses with error bars then you should not be allowed to have any input on public policy.
He then got onto the main points about trade versus the environment. The 1948 GATT Treaty prescribed non-discrimination in trade between nations, through reduction of tariffs and non-tariff barriers. Article XX allowed an out, namely a nation could put up barriers to trade for reasons of health or natural resources.
Most economists believe that trade provides a win-win situation, because of the theory of "competitive advantage". (It is certainly win-win for economists since they get paid far too much money given how useless most of them are.) But Ekins said this theory relies on capital not being mobile, and of course it is these days. So it's possible that trade is not win-win. And Ekins recommended that rather than relying on theories, economists should actually do empirical work to see what is the impact of trade. (Well, no doubt some of them do.)
Of course this is all complex. And the most complex area of them all is agriculture, which has additional concerns to do with security of supply. (You can do without a digital camera but you cannot do without food.) Here we got the usual British comfortable middle class view that agriculture should not just be there to produce food at the lowest possible cost. This is all very well for rich people to state.
Apparently GATT (and its replacement since 1995, the WTO) provided for special and differential access for the poorest countries. But needless to say things have gone almost the exact opposite way, particularly in service industries, where rich countries have enforced rigid and debilitating IPR rules on the rest of the world, and in agriculture, where rich countries have vastly subsidised their farmers to the detriment of farmers elsewhere. (But when the energy cost of transport skyrockets this might not have been a bad thing all along.)
You can see that politicians and civil servants and academics could produce endless reports on this subject with all the politically correct jargon in it. But it's hard to see any of this is advancing "sustainable" development.
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