What's happening in Hong Kong? 12 December 2005

Day One... Tuesday 13th

The WTO’s Sixth Ministerial meeting opened this afternoon amidst pomp and deflated expectations. Few are now foreseeing that the meeting will result in substantial changes to international rules governing agricultural subsidies or trade in agricultural and non-agricultural goods. But neither the intransigence of governments, nor the challenges of an ever-expanding security cordon, could dampen the spirits of the WWF delegation!

WWF’s demands are more achievable for being focused on areas of the negotiations outside the immediate political dogfight. We are campaigning for governments to invigorate their commitment to reforming fishing subsidies – redesigning the rules to outlaw those which fuel unsustainable fishing. Some of us spent much of the day in a last-minute drive to secure the attendance of an array of ministers (including those from the US, EU and Brazil) who have promised their support for a WWF side-event tomorrow morning. We also finalized plans for a second event – exploring scope for trade rules to help support emerging economies to put their development trajectories on a more sustainable footing, and drawing the unprecedented participation of the Chinese trade ministry.

As the first bloodied protestors appeared on the plasma screens, Gordon Shepherd contextualized WWF’s specific concerns in an opening press conference. “International trade rules can be pressed into service to help us address the biggest challenges that confront the world today – from climate change to poverty,” he said. “But unless we can begin to move beyond the unhelpful and wrong-headed separation of ‘environmental’ and ‘developmental’ challenges, we will struggle to achieve this.” WWF’s work on both fishing subsidies and environmental goods and services points the way to this more coherent approach.

So many of the ecoregional threats that WWF tackles can be traced to the production of things that are traded internationally – from oil palm to cod; and so many of the responses we make to such threats are similarly dependent upon internationally traded goods – from FSC timber to photovoltaic cells. Trade rules have profound effects in both worsening and relieving these threats…

… but can we make a difference? Watch this space! Look out also in tomorrow’s update for Jim Leape’s chairing of our side-events on fishing subsidies, and the role of new economies like China in making trade more sustainable.