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.