Environment Talks in WTO:Assisting The South or Making It Dependent on Imports of Technology? http://alainet.org/active/46001&lang=es

At the WTO negotiations on environmental goods and services, developing countries are being asked to eliminate tariffs on a broad range of products. This makes the developing countries more dependent on imports of technology, when the aim should be to enable them to develop their own environmental goods and services.However, doing so would create a development “loss” for developing countries. Since developed countries already apply quite low or zero tariffs on most industrial goods, including environmental goods, their burden of effective tariff reductions would be relatively much less than for developing countries. In short, developed countries are effectively asking developing countries in the context of the WTO negotiations in environmental goods to:Radically reduce their applied and bound tariffs on industrial products under the pollution management category by much more than what developed countries would be required to reduce.

Developing countries’ applied tariffs on such products average more than 8% (with most low- and middle-income developing countries having applied tariffs around 15-30%) and the bound tariffs on average around 32%;Treat the environmental goods negotiations as a separate “sectoral negotiation” to reduce or eliminate tariffs reduction or eliminate tariffs, with modalities different from (and steeper than) the tariff cuts under the NAMA negotiations on industrial goods.This treatment would move the environmental negotiations away from reflecting the principles of less than full reciprocity and special and differential treatment that rightfully favour developing countries. More seriously, cutting tariffs to zero for environmental goods would result in a surge of imports into developing countries and make them dependent on these imported goods and make it difficult or impossible for local industries producing environmental goods to survive or develop.

The developing countries would also become technologically dependent, unless other measures are put in place to ensure that developing countries can obtain and design the technologies themselves.The argument that the tariff elimination would benefit developing countries as they can import the products more cheaply runs into the same type of criticism regarding proposals for import liberalization in food products. Most developing countries place priority on local food production, and thus argue for having a category of “special products” which are exempted from tariff cuts or steep cuts. They also want a special safeguard to protect local farmers from import surges. Thus they are also against being pressurized into having to eliminate their tariffs on environmental goods since they wish to preserve policy space to be able produce these goods and their infant industries would need protection at least initially.