Environmental Reviews for Trade Pacts

July 12, 2000

Future trade agreements will be subject to tougher environmental reviews, according to a decision announced this week by the Clinton Administration.  An executive order, signed by President Clinton last November, commits the United States to careful assessment and consideration of the environmental impacts of future trade agreements including written reviews of certain major trade agreements, and directs the U.S. Trade Representative and Council on Environmental Quality to develop implementing guidelines.

Environmental concerns have been an impediment to smooth congressional approval of almost any trade-related legislation in recent years, most recently permanent normal trade relations with China.

"These draft guidelines show that when it comes to trade and the environment, we don't have to choose one or the other," said USTR Charlene Barshefsky.  "We can negotiate trade agreements that continue to open markets around the world to U.S. goods and services, protect the environment and promote sustainable development.  The key to these guidelines is public involvement early in the process to identify the relevant environmental issues, which will enable our negotiators to craft a strategy that will produce a good trade agreement and protect the environment."

CEQ Acting Chairman George T. Frampton, Jr. said the administration "is committed to ensuring that our efforts to promote free trade serve to strengthen, not weaken, environmental protections worldwide.  These draft guidelines will help achieve that goal by ensuring full and open environmental reviews of major trade agreements, and by helping our trade negotiators identify win-win opportunities to both strengthen the global economy and protect our environment."

The draft guidelines, which were published in the Federal Register Tuesday, propose procedures for public comment to identify potential environmental issues as early as possible in the development of the trade agreement, to maximize their usefulness for informing the negotiators. The guidelines also propose significant opportunities for public participation, including an open and public process for determining the scope of the review and in most cases an opportunity to comment on a draft review.

A public hearing on the draft guidelines will be held in Washington on August 2 and 3. The guidelines will be finalized in the fall.

The executive order institutionalizes, for the first time, the procedures for integrating consideration of environmental issues into the negotiating process.  The order recognizes that "environmental reviews are an important tool to help identify potential environmental effects of trade agreements, both positive and negative, and to help facilitate consideration of appropriate responses to those effects whether in the course of negotiations, through other means, or both," according to USTR.

The United States is committed to "careful assessment and consideration of the environmental impacts of future trade agreements, including environmental reviews of certain major agreements (comprehensive multilateral trade rounds, multilateral or bilateral free trade agreements, and major new agreements in natural resource sectors)," says EPA.  The order also provides that environmental reviews also may be done for other agreements based on such factors as the significance of reasonably foreseeable environmental impacts, although it is anticipated that most sectoral liberalization agreements will not require reviews.