Poverty the greatest environmental threat: ex-WTO head

from The Age

Peter Hannam

PERVERSE government subsidies are contributing to the plundering of the world's environment, with collapsing fish stocks among the biggest problems, said Mike Moore, former head of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

Among the worst-hit regions are waters off Africa which draw fishing fleets from East Asia, a trend aided by incentives such as tax deductions for fuel, Mr Moore said.

"So what happens, frequently, is these guys get the tender, and vacuum the lot out," he told the United Nations Environment Programme's Finance Initiative conference in Melbourne. "There's no incentive to be sustainable. And frequently the money doesn't even make it to the (African) country because it's cheaper to put in a bank in Switzerland for the politicians."

Mr Moore, a former prime minister of New Zealand, welcomed the gathering of bankers, insurers and financial industry delegates as an opportunity for "some very old ideas" to prevail against governments' tendency to opt for closed markets that stymie trade and hurt growth. "The greatest threat to the environment is poverty," he said.

Mr Moore also railed against big retailers counting "food miles" to curb carbon emissions from transport by encouraging consumers to opt for local produce. Farmers from Kenya, for instance, would suffer, he said.

By contrast, Michael Hawker, chief executive of Insurance Australia Group, hailed consumers as "the biggest driver" in forcing companies to be transparent about their greenhouse gas emissions and curb them.

Mr Moore also ruled out the WTO as a body that could lead global efforts to curb carbon emissions, by penalising countries that benefited from others' costly actions but took none of their own, for instance. It would take just one member's veto to block such WTO action. "In a perfect world, yes, of course, it should be inside an international institution," he said. "I just can't see us managing to do that in the next five years."

Paul Dickinson, chief executive of the Carbon Disclosure Project, which surveys companies' carbon action, however, said the time for dithering by nations was running out: "The development of carbon markets is rudimentary at the very least, and certainly not on course for any of the kind of reductions that we require to respond credibly to the problem."