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WTO 20th Anniversary Event: 20 years of building pathways to sustainable development - High-Level panel on the global environment and trade

Statement by Mr. Joakim Reiter, Deputy Secretary General

WTO 20th Anniversary Event: 20 years of building pathways to sustainable development - High-Level panel on the global environment and trade

WTO, Geneva
28 April 2015

Good morning, everyone.

Happy anniversary to WTO and thanks to WTO and UNEP for organizing this discussion. I have been asked to use this opportunity to share some insights about UNCTAD's views on the interaction between global trade and environmental regimes and how they can help countries achieve sustainable development.

Let me start by looking back.

Back in the 1990s when I began working on trade, and some of you may remember this, there were some very serious debates about how the GATT and WTO could potentially risk undermining environmental laws and ambitions.

But in UNCTAD's view, time has shown that most of these initial fears were unfounded. Today, we have to admit that multilateral cooperation has been largely successful in managing the risk of negative interaction between trade and environment.

This is not to say there have not been areas of contention. Or that it has been an easy journey.

But perhaps to the surprise of some, coexistence seems to work! CITES is a good example of this.

Moreover, both the UN and the WTO provide frameworks of principles, norms and rules that actually help countries advance towards sustainable development.

In fact, both institutions have helped us to come a long way from the initial narrow concern of industrial pollution of the 70s to the more encompassing multifaceted concept of sustainable development and green economies today. This evolution of concepts and principles were well accompanied by the GATT-WTO hard rule making processes.

My second point, however, is that we have to realize that managing the interaction between legal regimes, especially avoiding conflicts between the two, is not the same as helping countries to seriously promote and scale up their efforts for sustainable development.

Avoiding conflict is a start, and an important one, but we need to do more, actually much more.

We need to ensure greater mutual supportiveness;

We need to ensure synergies between the environmental and trade frameworks;

We need not only to strengthen cooperation; we need to ensure coherence.

There is a sense of great urgency to this; to give just one example, climate change is a real challenge to humanity. In area after area, mankind footprint is like a bull in a china shop.

My third point is that there is some good news with the a new set of global ambitions -- as outlined in the Rio +20 Declaration, "The future we want", and also in the proposed Sustainable Development Goals. This is a crucial year to pursue this. We have the potential for a real long-lasting "game changer" in multilateralism.

Four meetings this year give us the opportunities we seek:

  1. the Finance for Development conference in July;
  2. the SDGs summit in September;
  3. the COP 21 in December; and
  4. the WTO Ministerial also in December. This unique opportunity must not be missed. But it also involves serious homework in the area of trade and environment as well as trade and development.

Let me try to be more concrete, with 3 examples:

  1. Governments should take action, as a matter of priority, in disciplining fishery, agriculture and fuel subsidies that deplete natural resources in an unsustainable manner.
  2. Governments should make better use of trade as an engine for environment and prosperity, including by expanding the list of environmental goods and services and reviving the Environmental Goods and Services negotiations. And that also includes improving technology diffusion and a global market for renewable energies among others.
  3. Governments, while pursuing ambitious green economic policies, must take full responsibilities for ensuring that these measures are the least trade restrictive and do not frustrate DC's integration into the global economy.

Those three issues and many more are exactly the things that UNCTAD works with

I would like to highlight here that there is overreliance and a tendency to assume that hard law, which is WTO's key role, can work as a panacea but it never will be. All international institutions, without any exception, must be mobilized within their respective areas of competence to meet the challenge of sustainable development. So we will do our best in UNCTAD.

That leads me to the conclusion.

Governments and institutions will offer some guiding principles on how we should approach development and sustainable development rules. This will ensure that environment and poverty alleviation through trade go hand in hand.

Thank you for your attention.