Climate Change

One of the things I taught my international relations students was the importance of regimes.  There are critically important international environmental regimes such as the Montreal Protocol, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Kyoto Protocol, among many others. I also really tried to emphasize to my students the importance of the post World War II liberal democratic order that brought forth the UN, the Marshall Plan, the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).  The GATT, of course, became the World Trade Organization in 1995.  One of the prime reasons why the world went into an economic depression in the early 1930’s was the steady increase of trade protectionism.  Geniuses like John Maynard Keynes knew that international trade disputes needed to be discussed and worked out in order to prevent future depressions and the chaos of world war that was a principal consequence of the Great Depression.  Thus Keynes and his colleagues created the GATT at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944.

The recent WTO talks, focused primarily on agricultural subsidies, have collapsed.  There are many intricate ins and outs but the friction lies in the realm of subsidies.  The US, the EU and Japan spend $300 billion a year on various forms of subsidy to farmers and the developing world feels as if it can’t compete.  There is a large body of evidence to support this view.  It is not, however, the bailiwick of this blog to argue these matters.  Besides, there are more expert analyses out there than mine.

However, it is up to us here to recognize the implications of the failure of the WTO talks for confronting the climate change crisis.  If we can’t get a handle on trade, then what is going to happen on greenhouse gases, deforestation, the poisoning of the atmosphere and ocean with nitrogen from fertilizers, etc., etc.?   See, for example, WTO failure bodes ill for climate change: delegates from the AFP via Yahoo News.  The EU agriculture commissioner, Mariann Fischer-Boel, is quoted:  “If we cannot even manage trade, how should we then find ourselves in a position to manage the new challenges lying ahead of us.”  She meant climate change. 

We have miles to go before we sleep, and there are many positive trends and signals on climate change, but if nations dig in and are not able to find common cause we’re all going to be, in a word, cooked.  

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 7:21 pm and is filed under Business and Economics, Governments and Politics, Biofuels and Agriculture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.