Will APEC honor pledge on development?

Will APEC honor pledge on development?

By Xavier Furtado

APEC, associated mainly with trade and economic liberalization
and development cooperation, is also interested in sustainable
development.

SINGAPORE: The much-touted "East Asian miracle" has exacted a
high price. While the region's fantastic growth has helped to
raise millions of people out of abject poverty, decades of
unsustainable development practices have wreaked havoc on the
region's environment. The signs of this are evident to anyone who
lives in or has visited the region: smog in Bangkok and Kuala
Lumpur; polluted waterways in Manila; industrial effluents in
Hongkong's harbor.

Furthermore, the projected growth and consumption patterns of
East Asian societies promises to exacerbate this phenomenon. In
attempting to address these concerns, and foster region-side
cooperation on these issues, what sort of role might there be for
APEC, the region's principal transpacific organization?

Beginning as a small and informal meeting of trade and
economic ministers, APEC's mandate has grown to address issues
such as human resource development, marine resource conservation,
sustainable development and emerging infectious diseases.

While some of APEC's working groups have been addressing
sustainability issues since its first meeting in Canberra in
1989, it was not until the creation of the Sustainable
Development Dialogue in 1993 that environmental issues assumed a
higher profile within the forum. Since that time, there have been
three meetings of APEC's Environment Ministers and, increasingly,
a close examination of APEC's working groups reveals how
sustainability issues are influencing the organization's agenda.

Building on this growing momentum, Canada, as 1997's chair of
the APEC process, tried to strengthen APEC's capacity to address
sustainability issues by tabling them at the highest level within
APEC, the Economic Leaders' Meeting.

At APEC's 1995 meeting in Osaka, it was suggested that the
Economic Committee (EC) undertake an assessment of complex
environmental issues via a new initiative entitled "FEEEP" (food,
energy, environment, economic growth and population). In
preparation for last year's Leaders' Meeting in Vancouver, Canada
organized and hosted the first ever FEEEP Symposium.

Held from Sept. 1-4 in Saskatoon, Canada, the Symposium
brought together some 200 policymakers, academics and non-
governmental organization (NGO) representatives from throughout
the region to focus their expertise on how markets, technology
and effective governance might be used to foster sustainable
growth in the region. The findings of these discussions were fed
into the Interim FEEEP Report to Leaders, prepared by the EC and
presented to the Leaders' Meeting in Vancouver.

Keeping with APEC's focus on economic liberalization and
development cooperation, the bulk of the symposium focused on how
market mechanisms might be enhanced or extended to areas where
governments have normally decided the distribution of scarce
resources, especially in agriculture and energy production. While
this was deemed acceptable to most of the delegates present, it
did not meet with unanimous approval.

In particular, Japan's representatives, insisting that "food
security" was too important to leave to the market, argued that
in some instances the market mechanism would be inappropriate. It
is likely that these sorts of disagreements are just the
beginning. As the FEEEP agenda continues to evolve, more severe
disagreements will emerge.

At the Vancouver Leaders' Meeting, both the Ministerial Joint
Statement and the Leaders' Declaration, aside from commending the
FEEEP task force, also endorsed a series of other initiatives
presently being undertaken in the area of sustainable development
inside as well as outside of APEC. This included the work of the
Fisheries Working Group, the Sustainable Cities Program of
Action, the creation of an APEC Environmental Protection Center
in China and, under the auspices of the Marine Resource
Conservation Working Group, the work of the Ocean Resource
Network for the Pacific (ORNEP).

Additionally, leaders supported members' participation in the
UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN-FCCC) as a way to
accelerate international action on addressing greenhouse gases.
While noteworthy, it is too early to tell whether or not any of
this will result in concrete action.

While the symposium was an invaluable first step, one cannot
help but wonder about the future of FEEEP (and these sorts of
issues) within APEC. Environmental degradation in the Asia
Pacific region, after all, is not merely a function of poor
policy development. It is also a question of governance. The
inability of the Indonesian government, for example, to enforce
its own laws against burning reflects the prevalence of
entrenched political/economic interests in the forestry sector
over national and international environmental concerns.

This tension posed an insurmountable obstacle to effective
action. The short-run economic concerns of political and business
elites who have, for decades, reaped the benefits of their
involvement in Indonesia's forestry industry were pit against
longer-term considerations of sustainability (that is, issues
that should also be at the center of responsible government
policy). The challenge to APEC, and the FEEEP task force, will be
to find ways to address effectively these types of shortcomings
in a forum that is consensual, non-binding and in a region where
national sovereignty is guarded jealously.

Another consideration is whether or not FEEEP, and APEC's
greater focus on sustainability, will survive beyond 1997. As it
is, not all of APEC's members are keen on the FEEEP agenda as it
may stand in the way of rapid economic growth and development.
Not only must FEEEP's most enthusiastic supporters move
cautiously within APEC to continually forge consensus, but they
must also ensure that, as the chair of APEC passes to other
members with different sets of priorities, FEEEP concerns are not
subsumed and lost beneath the other issues that make up APEC's
expanding agenda.

Unfortunately, the haze that shrouded South-East Asian cities
a few months ago may be just what governments in the region need.
The haze was a painful demonstration of the transnational
character of environmental threats and the detrimental affects
they can have on the region's politics and economic prospects if
left unattended. Even if concerns over sustainability prove
insufficient, maybe the possibility of slowed economic growth,
and the threat of political instability, will motivate the
region's leadership to use APEC's penchant for fostering dialogue
and collaborative problem-solving to address East Asia's
environmental woes.

The writer is a research analyst with the Asia Pacific
Foundation of Canada. The views expressed in this piece are his
alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the foundation.