5:59 AM Feb 9, 1994

MINISTERIAL MEET ON TRADE

Geneva 9 Feb (Chakravarthi Raghavan) -- A meeting of environment ministers from about 24 countries of the North and South are meeting in Geneva next week, 16 February, to consider trade issues, under the title "Prospects of Developing Countries: Environment and Trade".

Environment and Trade is now the 'hottest', and some say the 'sexiest', issue on international agenda.

Next week's meeting was initially convened by the head of the UN Environment Programme, Canadian Elizabeth Dowdeswell, and was apparently intended to focus on the proposed GATT/WTO work programme on trade and environment issues -- an area where the industrialized world has been finding strong resistance, with a measure of unity, from the South.

Side by side, over the last several months, trade and environment ministers or officials of the 24-member OECD in Paris, have been discussing among themselves the trade/environment questions.

The NGOs of these countries have also been participating in these discussions as members of their country delegations. The US and EC recently met at The Hague to consider trade/environment questions, and the EC is having a similar meeting in Vienna with EFTA countries.

Northern NGOs are also in the process of formulating a common position -- focusing on the trade/environment issues visavis the Marrakesh ministerial meeting and what the proposed World Trade Organization should do on these matters.

The NGOs of the South, though, have not been doing a similar exercise, though some are invited by Northern NGOs for meetings.

The effort in the North, of governments and some of their NGOs has been to formulate a common OECD position, and as in the past use it to push it through international organizations, and particularly the GATT.

When Dowdeswell sent out the invitations, and word of it got around, several of the countries of the South, and their GATT delegations, appear to have raised objections and questions, including on the competence of the UNEP in these matters.

As a result, the meeting is now being cosponsored by UNEP and UNCTAD (which has a mandate to deal with trade, environment and sustainable development questions) and, as a result, has also altered the focus of the agenda to make it appear to be an attempt to address developing country issues and concerns.

The three-point agenda of the one-day meeting, with each agenda having two or three sub-agenda items, each of which alone could well need a day for in-depth discussion, and all of which together could get no more than a cursory and superficial treatment.

This would be even more so given the normal attention span of most ministers, whether from the North or the South.

The proposed agenda of the meeting is now said to be:

1. Trade Liberalization, Environment Protection and Sustainable development: Prospects for Developing Countries

(a) opportunities and challenges for developing countries -- Uruguay round, NAFTA and other developments; (b) environment standards, competitiveness and market access; (c) trade measures and environment;

2. Building North-South partnership

(a) implementation of UNCED recommendations, (b) National responsibilities for capacity building, (c) financial incentives and trade-environment measures

3. Cooperating to meet Developing country needs

(a) responses to developing country needs, (b) coordination of UN organisations' work

UNEP's invitations went to Environment Ministers of Argentina, Brazil, China, Egypt, Ghana, Hong Kong, India, Jamaica, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Thailand and Zimbabwe (from the South); and Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden, USA and UK from the OECD; and Hungary from eastern Europe.

Besides the environment ministers, organizations who will participate are: UNCTAD, the GATT, the European Union and the OECD.