Environment ministers go on record

We held a press conference in Cozumel last night to encourage environment ministers meeting there to go on record with their positions in the lead up to the WTO.

The meeting was before the opening of the High Level Roundtable on Trade and Environment, organized by the Mexican Minister of the Environment.

High level, indeed. It was held at a five star hotel on the island of Cozumel, off the coast of Cancun. Ministers and their representatives arrived by helicopter last night for a series of discussions today on how to preserve environmental regulations in the face of WTO decisions.

We had the environment ministers from Germany, the UK, and Sweden and Mexico, as well as representatives from Brazil and the United Nations Environment Program give short speeches on one of our most important issues here in Cancun; the relationship between Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) and the WTO. MEAs include the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change and the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which is scheduled to come into force on September 11. These agreements could be threatened by the WTO process, if new trade rules begin to undermine the agreements already reached. It was important for us to get the environment ministers meeting in Cozumel to agree that the WTO must not weaken these MEAs.

While the final declarations of the ministers were not as strong as we might have wished, by the end of the meeting we had sent a signal to the WTO conference that the trade rules they come up with should not take priority over agreements reached to support sustainable development.

More on the relationship between the Biosafety Protocol and the WTO