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3.	Trade with a Difference?
	The pledge made by APEC environment ministers at their June, 1997 meeting in Toronto to "commit to sustainable development as a fundamental objective to achieve human prosperity and a healthy environment" is only the latest in a long series of official declarations suggesting that APEC is a new kind of trade organization - one that keeps the environmental costs of growth in mind. But has reality matched the rhetoric? And can APEC do more to ensure that economic progress does not come at a disastrous environmental price? The NGO 'Focus on the Global South`, in a recent report authored by Walden Bello and Nicola Bullard, suggests that APEC has failed to introduce effective environmental programs because "major US and other Asia-Pacific corporations which are backing APEC's free trade agenda are not sympathetic to an environmental program which will add to their cost of doing business in the region." This analysis is in line with the pessimistic view that free trade regimes like APEC encourage a "race to the bottom", where countries compete for business investment by lowering environmental standards. The opposing view is that trade agreements promote upward harmonization: optimists say the internationalization of production will lead to the adoption of the ISO 14000 standards by APEC members and that large-market countries will provide a market for green-produced goods. They also point to the example of the EU, where rich countries have provided subsidies to raise the environmental standards of poorer nations. But the EU may not be a realistic model for APEC, partly because there are more poor countries in APEC which would need aid - aid that some powerful APEC economies such as the United States are currently unwilling to offer. APEC is also unique in experiencing the kind of massive economic growth that threatens, for example, to exhaust the forests of Indonesia within 10 years and double the amount of coal consumed in China by 2020. Given such rates of resource depletion and energy consumption, merely raising standards to match those of the more developed trading partners will not avert catastrophe. For example, a plan to apply US automobile emission standards to all APEC countries, will still add to the unbearable air pollution burden of many Asian cities. This has led Lyuba Zarsky, co-ordinator of the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development, to conclude that pursuing only market-driven solutions will cause environmental standards to remain "stuck in the mud." What's really required, she says, is for APEC to mandate new environmental standards well beyond anything that exists today. [free trade meets sustainable development]
	APEC Member Economies Australia Brunei Canada Chile China Hong Kong Indonesia Japan Malaysia Mexico New Zealand Papua, New Guinea Philippines Singapore South Korea Taiwan Thailand United States
	Green-produced goods n. goods produced by non-polluting and conserving processes. harmonization n. integration of environmental standards across jurisdictional boundaries thus making them uniform.
	APEC Eminent Persons Group. Achieving the APEC vision: free and open trade in the Asia Pacific. 2nd. Report of the Eminent Persons Group. Singapore: APEC Secretariat, 1994. 80p. Special Issue on Trade and the Environment in the APEC Region. Journal of Environment and Development 6 (September 1997).
Virtual Idea	The bulletin produced by FOCUS (Focus on the Global South) on APEC Nautilus Institute materials on APEC -trade and environment