ESF: FoEE presentation - The impact of NAMA negotiations on natural resources and the EU position

Participants of the workshop on NAMA

Andrea Baranes, Mary Lou Malig, Charly Poppe

WORKSHOP: Not in my NAMA! What is the EU’s Responsibility in the WTO Non-Agricultural Market Access Negotiations?

Athens, Thursday 4th May 2006
14:30h-17:30h
Room S106

“The impact of NAMA negotiations on natural resources and the EU position”

Presentation by Charly Poppe

Junior Trade Campaigner, Friends of the Earth Europe

As evoked by our two previous speakers (NB: Andrea Baranes, CRBM, and Mary Lou Malig, Focus on the Global South), NAMA is not only about industrial tariffs. It also includes economic sectors where natural resources are involved. The sectors include, for instance, fisheries, forestry, mining and gem products. The WTO considers these sectors as merely economic, and fish or trees are considered as nothing more than pure economic goods. The underlying logic of this blind liberalization agenda is that trade of fish or timber is actually a good thing and should be promoted further… and the NAMA negotiations at the WTO provide for a perfect framework to pursue this agenda: through the lowering or elimination of tariffs in these sectors, trade will be increased, consumers will be happy because the prices will go down, and producers will gain in efficiency (thanks to the “positive” effect of international competition and the law of comparative advantages).

In other words, for most WTO members, the question whether liberalization of trade in natural resources is actually desirable or not is not an issue anymore. The debate at the WTO is already one step ahead: it is about to what extent trade in these sectors should be liberalized, what kind of tariff lines or rates should be taken into consideration and what kind of modalities (for instance the so-called tariff “coefficients”) will finally apply to the different country groupings represented at the WTO (grosso modo: developed countries, on the one hand, and developing countries on the other).

Today, after the Hong Kong Ministerial Conference, negotiations on natural resources are on the table of WTO negotiators. However, they have not really started yet as WTO members are still discussing technicalities such as the ones outlined above.

Natural resources can be dealt with in three different areas of the NAMA negotiations:

- the general formula negotiations
- the sectoral negotiations
- the negotiations on non-tariff barriers (NTB)

In the run-up to Hong Kong and as a result of lobbying from Friends of the Earth Europe, the EU has taken a rather progressive stance on this issue. The EU has publicly stated that it will not support sector-by-sector negotiations on natural resources. This is good although it is not sufficient, as “not supporting” a negotiation does not mean “actively opposing”. And that is precisely what the EU should be doing, as did other countries such as Japan and Korea in some of these dossiers. On the other hand, this is not totally the reality of the EU position as:

1) There is no consensus among the EU member states on that (Norway and Finland are for instance in favour of sectoral negotiations on forestry)
2) The EU is pushing for an anti-sustainable agenda through the NTB negotiations, for instance recently by advocating for an elimination of export taxes and export restrictions in developing countries. Export restrictions are important in the case of natural resources as they often constitute an effective policy tool used for safeguarding a series of domestic natural resources (for instance to control the export of tropical timber, which is famous for being widely and wildly over-exploited).

Safeguarding natural resources is critical for sustainable development, in the North as well as in the South. It is also vital for the livelihoods of local communities, of fisherfolk, of indigenous people.

This is not only advocated by environmentalists and NGOs. It is also increasingly acknowledged in academic studies and even in recent studies from the World Bank. The European Commission itself has commissioned thorough studies, through a programme of so-called “Sustainability Impact Assessments” (SIAs), that give very clear indications of the potential negative impacts of trade liberalisation in natural resources, in particular in the forestry and fisheries sectors. But so far the EU has never taken these studies seriously. This is a shame and we have been encouraging the Commission to do more with these SIAs.

Our natural resources are a public good. Our natural resources are not for sale.


Charly Poppe
Athens, 4 May 2006