Source: Carnegie
For Immediate Release: August 26, 2003
Contact: Maura Keaney, 202-939-2372, mkeaney@ceip.org
Carnegie Paper Spotlights Failure of Congressional Environmental Reviews
Pushes for US to Correct Inefficiencies in Time for the
2003 Free Trade Area of the Americas Negotiations
A new paper from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The Environmental Review of the FTAA: Examining the U.S. Approach, reveals that Congressional environmental reviews of U.S. trade negotiations fall short of providing timely and useful information to policy makers. With the negotiations of Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) quickly approaching, the paper argues that it is critical for Congress to rectify the methods and processes applied to environmental reviews and ensure they inform trade negotiation in a timely manner, not simply to justify predetermined trade positions. The policy brief is part of a series from Carnegie's Trade, Equity, and Development Project.
Congress uses environmental reviews to assess the potential environmental benefits and costs of agreements being considered by U.S. trade policy makers. Attempts to utilize these reviews in past agreements, such as the bilateral free trade agreements with Jordan and Singapore, have received criticism for poor methodology and late submission. "These shortcomings threaten to undermine the efficacy of environmental reviews and further erode the American public's confidence in U.S. trade policy," writes Kevin P. Gallagher, author of report.
The United States is scheduled to release a draft environmental review of the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement in October 2003. If enacted, the FTAA will be the largest regional trading area in the world economy. "Not only will this review provide controversial estimates that will be unintelligible to policy makers, it also will fail to take into account some of the largest potential harmful effects of the FTAA. Further, it will not provide policy makers with negotiating strategies to mitigate any environmental problems they do identify."
Kevin P. Gallagher is a research associate with the Global Development and Environment Institute, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University.
The paper is now available online at www.ceip.org/pubs.
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