Draft-Horse, Not Dragon: Observations on Trade and the Environment

There is a war brewing between free-trade advocates and those who actively support environmental protection measures. For a variety of reasons, many have come to perceive the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) as an overly complicated and outdated system of rules and regulations slanted against environmental concerns. However, GATT is a system that can be reconciled with sound environmental policy if only environmental and free-trade partisans will work together to fine tune it. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiations provide an opportunity to work preventively to harmonize bilateral environmental and trade issues. If this US-Mexico program is done right, it will be based on the realization that developing country environmental problems are basically problems of resource management, which require not only capital but also technical assistance and time to solve. Industrialized countries can give less developed countries a helping hand in environmental management training, so that they can gradually take competent control of their own resource bases and move their economies into least-pollution modes.