Ethiopia's heroic stand against the OPEC lobby effectively prevented a 'sell-out', writes Frank McDonald
It was an impassioned midnight plea by the Ethiopian delegate, arguing that some things were more important than mere trade, that turned the tide on one of the crunch issues facing the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Suddenly, a dastardly plan to allow trade to take precedence over the environment was dashed.
Norway, itself an oil-producing country, rowed in behind Ethiopia. So did the small island states of St Lucia and Tuvalu. Other developing countries, outside OPEC, and the EU then ensured that the controversial text referring to the need for "consistency" with WTO rules was deleted. A significant victory had been won.
Had it gone the other way, the precedent set by Johannesburg would have called into question the Kyoto Protocol, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety and the Stockholm Convention on POPs (persistent organic compounds). It might even have nullified future multilateral environmental agreements.
What the 180-plus countries have now committed themselves to is "to enhance the mutual support of trade, environment and development, with a view to achieving sustainable development". A bland enough formulation, certainly, but at least it no longer contains the tag-line specifying "consistency" with the rules of the WTO.
The environment and development NGOs (non-governmental organisations) attending the summit, including those from Ireland, had lobbied very hard on this "trade versus environment" issue over the past week or so.
And with some justification they claimed credit for the quite unexpected turnaround; game, if not quite set and match, to them.
The WTO would argue that promoting trade and protecting the environment need not be mutually exclusive goals. But there is real resistance to "greening" its rules from developing countries which account for 75 per cent of its 144 member-states because they regard this as a pretext for impeding access to markets for their produce.
Changes in the WTO rules agreed last November in Doha, conceded reluctantly under pressure from the EU, do respect the rights of member-states to set high environmental standards. These would include the EU's proposed "eco-labelling" scheme for sustainably produced goods, which developing countries view with suspicion.
Since free trade includes the movement of capital, environmentalists have long feared that the subjugation of environmental protection to trade would encourage "dirty" industries to relocate to developing countries with lower environmental standards, stimulating a "race to the bottom" as they compete with each other to attract such inward investment.
But the relationship between WTO rules and multilateral environmental agreements, such as the Johannesburg deal to at least "risk-manage" if not phase out use of toxic chemicals by 2020, has always been a murky area. Which should take precedence, the environment or trade? Until Ethiopia intervened, it seemed trade would win the day here.
Had the free traders succeeded, it would have been up to the WTO to define what was meant by "sustainable trade".
According to Earth Summit Ireland, the coalition of Irish environment and development groups set up as a watchdog for Johannesburg, this could have led to the EU being forced to accept GM foods and hormone-treated beef.
However, the NGOs haven't had it all their own way. For example, the goal of halving the number of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015 has been weakened by weasel words, in this case, "aiming to achieve". And while this would involve providing millions of taps and toilets, there is no indication where the water will come from.
The draft text has also dropped positive references to agricultural niche markets, such as fair trade coffee and organic farming, and it leaves the definition of "sustainable agriculture" so open that it could even include GM crops. The fact that there is no mention either of the precautionary principle has reinforced this concern.
In the endless horse-trading there were other casualties. As a sop to the more authoritarian developing countries, the other blocs agreed to delete a reference in the text to citizens' right of access to information and participation in decision-making, even though this was one of the "Rio Principles" from 1992.