Daniel Schramm

January 2, 2007

In 1999, the much-maligned anti-globalization movement brought the World Trade Organization's Ministerial Conference in Seattle to a grinding halt, using non-violent tactics to draw media attention to the many social and environmental costs of the WTO's trade rules.[1]

It worked; no less a proponent of free trade than then-President Bill Clinton acknowledged that those concerns -- inhumane working conditions, fractured communities, despoiled ecosystems -- were not being addressed adequately. These sorts of costs, not national security, moved to the center of the diplomatic community's attention.

Two years later, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked, and everything changed. The Bush administration launched an aggressive military counterattack, embraced unilateralism and put national security ahead of what appeared to be less immediate global issues such as the environment and sustainable economic policies.

This reaction, embraced at the time by the vast majority of Congress, could be characterized as myopic -- given that terrorists tend to choose targets for their resonant symbolic value and that these particular terrorists attacked the World Trade Center.

Today, with America waging a war on terrorism, the concerns about the WTO raised by the demonstrators in Seattle have dropped off the radar of the public, the media and most policymakers. But the WTO continues to decide trade disputes among its members and, in the name of free trade, continues to enforce restrictive rules that inhibit the ability of sovereign states to ensure environmental protection and social cohesion.

That brings us to a recently released WTO panel report on the dispute between the United States and the European Union over genetically modified organisms. A recent series of Post-Dispatch news stories on efforts to use biotech crops as a solution to African hunger glossed over this report, noting simply that the EU lost the case. But there is much more in this 1,100-page report that merits attention, and anyone concerned about sustainable development and national security in the 21st century has reason to worry.

First, the panel report declared that the so-called precautionary principle is not part of customary international law and cannot be considered in deciding disputes under the WTO's rules.

What does that mean? Think of the precautionary principle in terms of lyrics from the Joni Mitchell tune "Big Yellow Taxi:" "You don't know what you've got/ Till it's gone."

Each parent who does everything possible to shield his or her children from unknown or uncertain risks understands this principle. Apparently, though, it is not well-established enough to be a legitimate factor in considering laws to protect the environment on an intergenerational, continental scale.

In the context of genetically modified organisms, ignoring the precautionary principle allows the WTO panel report to ignore a growing body of scientific evidence that the organisms may create major long-term problems for ecosystem integrity and sustainable pest-control -- even if they may not pose a direct threat to human health.

The panel also refused to give legal weight to other major treaties, such as the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (ratified by the EU and 136 other countries), which calls for a precautionary approach to the application of genetically modified organism technology. It ignored the Cartagena Protocol because the three countries complaining about its provisions -- the United States, Canada and Argentina -- had not ratified it. This reasoning leaves the door open for the WTO to ignore any treaty that has not been ratified by all 149 WTO members, even if all parties to a specific dispute have.

To use a term from linguist George Lakoff, the WTO allows countries to "frame" as simple trade disputes complaints that actually involve complex and nuanced controversies with deep cultural roots and social implications. In effect, the ruling on genetically modified organisms represents the WTO's consolidation of power over all kinds of disputes that have at least some impact on trade.

And it goes well beyond genetically modified organisms. Attempts to deal with global warming through international treaties (i.e., the Kyoto Protocol) may be hindered if unhappy countries choose the WTO as the forum in which to challenge trade-restrictive climate regulations.

Among the many failures of the American political establishment in its response to 9/11, future historians will note the lost opportunity to strike a less aggressive, more conciliatory posture on trade. The current drive to advance the interests of American big business through the WTO's trade-tilted rules -- regardless of the loss of goodwill among allies around the world -- will be perceived as one more element of the incoherent and counterproductive war on terrorism.

Daniel Schramm, 25, is a second-year law student at Vermont Law School in South Royalton, Vt., and a graduate of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn. He is a member of the Parkway North High School class of 2000.

[1] This article was recently run in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, available at http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/editorialcommentary/story/23141803FDEAD59C8625725300812D60?OpenDocument&highlight=2%2C%22schramm%22.