UNCTAD/WTO/ITC Side Event at UNFCCC COP 21
09 December 2015
Ladies and Gentlemen,
COP 21 is often seen as a meeting about environment and climate, but it is much more: it is arguably the most important summit about the future of trade.
What the international community decides in Paris will shape the future patterns of trade, and its ability to foster growth, job creation and development. And in a way, it will also determine the power trade will have to fight poverty in the future.
In developing countries, rural communities - where the bulk of the poor lives today rely heavily, if not almost exclusively, on their natural habitat and resources for income, food, fuel and shelter.
Their habitat determines what they produce and what they can trade. But due to climate change, this habitat is now changing, and sometimes dramatically.
In 2011 the drought-induced famine in the Horn of Africa affected more than 10 million people.
In Latin America, climate change is to blame for the rapid expansion of a fungus, which attacks coffee plantations, killing trees.
In Africa and Asia, where tourism is a critical source of revenues, particularly for LDCs, climate change has increased the likelihood of coral bleaching and eventually dying off, discouraging tourists.
In coastal areas around the globe, fish stocks are not only dwindling because of overfishing, but also because ocean acidification caused by changes in climate.
Pretty much everywhere, we see a gradual but stable loss of biodiversity, unprecedented in recent history. According to some scientist, the current pace of plant and animal loss implies that by the end of the century, 20 to 50% of all living species on earth could be gone, forever.
In short, with climate change, the prospects for rising out of poverty from producing and trading the yields from your land, your forests or your sea will become all the more harder.
But, climate change is not only affecting what we can trade; it is also affecting our capacity to trade.
Around 80 per cent of global trade by volume and over 70 per cent by value are carried by sea and are handled by ports worldwide. But many ports, especially in developing countries are not ready to withstand stronger and more frequent hurricanes, bigger and more powerful waves, or rising sea levels. For example, a projected sea-level rise in Tanzania of 70 centimeters by 2070 could devastate the port city of Dar es Salaam, a major player in East Africa trade and in many ways a "life line" for Tanzania as well as adjacent countries.
Our common transportation systems -- the arteries of our trade-- are not prepared to cope with climate change.
My friends,
So what can and should we - who deal with trade - do, to ensure that climate change is better managed? What is our contribution? How do we ensure that trade and trade policy live up to that challenge?
While there is no possibility here to even attempt to be exhaustive, I see two broad lines of actions for trade policy-makers:
First: to stop doing the wrong thing.
Second: to enhance trade's positive contribution.
Let me exemplify.
We need to put an end to trade distortions, subsidies, or similar trade incentives that: 1) prop up wasteful and unsustainable economic activities; 2) fuel the excessive use of carbon-intensive technologies and; 3) deplete the resources that we need for our common prosperity.
We need to tackle tendencies to erect new barriers against renewables, including biofuels. We need more stringent conditions for the imposition of measures, including trade defense instruments that work against "green growth", even when these are claimed to serve the interest of certain green jobs.
Similarly, fossil fuel-subsidies have no place in a climate-friendly economy. Neither have those fish subsidies that deplete already critically strained fish stocks.
And we also need to enhance trade's positive contributions to reducing carbon-emissions.
Trade and investment are key channel of technological diffusion, and also important means for structural transformation and economic diversification. Open trade, if priced correctly, can create the right incentives for producers to improve efficiency and cut waste.
We need to better use Trade for our common good.
And one way of doing so is to create an open global market in environmental technologies. This can make environmentally friendly products and technologies cheaper and more accessible to others, especially to developing countries.
We need to be better in using the international production networks, which today dominate global trade, to ensure "greening of supply chains". Increased transparency across supply-chains, combined with capacity building for poorer producers to meet higher standards, is necessary to put a market premium on doing the right thing.
We need to promote exports, by developing countries, of green goods and services, just as we should enhanced investment in sustainability in these countries.
We need to support the commercialization of biodiversity, be it through tourism or BioTrade, so as to create incentives to nurturing and preserving biodiversity everywhere, particularly in poorer countries and rural communities.
But we also need to recognize that Aid for Trade will not be enough to deal with climate-induced trade disruptions. Additional climate finance is required to manage the transformation of economic activities in developing countries, and indeed our trading infrastructure, to new man-made realities.
We need to take collective responsibility for adjusting our current transportation systems. We need to ensure greater sustainability of transport, without reducing the gains of developing countries from trade. And we need to enhance the resilience to climate effects of our transportation system.
The list is long. And it should be.
Climate change is perhaps THE fight of our generation. It is a fight for everyone, because climate change affects us all.
And it is a fight for the trade policy community, because global trade - as we know it - is jeopardized by climate change.
It is high time that we, in the trade community, make our fullest contribution.
Thank you
