Forging a deal on tackling climate change will be even harder than hammering out long-stalled international trade talks, the head of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has warned.
Pascal Lamy told a small group of reporters that trade policies could play a key role in fighting global warming, with shifts on agricultural subsidies and tariffs all possible solutions.
"I've always said that a multilateral agreement on CO2 emissions is probably much more difficult than a multilateral agreement on exports of pigs or poultry or socks," he said in a weekend interview on the Indonesian island of Bali.
The Doha Development Round of WTO negotiations has been deadlocked since its inception in 2001, with rich and poor countries at loggerheads over agricultural subsidies and industrial tariffs.
"There is an element of similarity because it is about adjusting multilateral rules to a new reality," Lamy said.
Government delegates from up to 190 countries are in Bali trying to agree on a timetable of negotiations for a new climate initiative when the current phase of the existing treaty -- the Kyoto Protocol -- expires in 2012.
Rich and poor nations appear divided on who should make legally-binding commitments on cutting emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming and who should pay for the damage wrought by climate change.
"I think everybody agrees that climate change is a common responsibility with differentiated responsibility" Lamy said. "How differentiated, that's for the negotiations."
Trade ministers and then finance ministers have held talks in Bali on the role of commerce and economics in the fight against global warming.
The United States, the European Union and Brazil emerged divided over a US-EU proposal for fewer tariffs among WTO members on 43 environmentally friendly products, with Brazil loudly protesting the exclusion of ethanol.
Trying to define what products were "green" when so many were dual use was very complex both in Bali and in the Doha round, Lamy said.
Lamy acknowledged that trade -- with products circling the globe by air and sea -- did have a so-called carbon footprint, but urged more research on the extent of the damage it causes to the environment.
"It's not obvious that trade opening has a bad CO2 footprint; it depends on many things, notably on transport. Shipping is 50 times less CO2 emitting than air fright, for instance," he said.
Flowers grown in Kenya and flown to Europe, he said, had lower CO2 emission than flora grown in Europe in energy-heavy greenhouses and storage facilities.
"It's a perfectly relevant concern, provided all the numbers are on the table and you factor in your calculation of the CO2 print of the guy who goes and buys the thing with a four-wheel-drive at Wal-Mart."
But there was crossover between the work of the WTO and battling climate change, he said, pointing to one of the key issues on the table in the Doha round -- agricultural subsidies.
"Reducing agricultural subsidies in many ways is good for climate change because you provide a comparative advantage to somebody whose natural conditions are better," he said.
"So for the same amount of food, the consumption of natural resources like water or CO2 is better."
Lamy said the trade body would be ready to adapt to any decisions that came out of the Bali conference.
"We have a whole toolbox, and it's a question of getting the right signal from the environmental people on what they want to do, and then we align our own toolbox," he said.Agence France Presse
