DOLPHINS
MARCH
IN
THE STREETS OF CANCUN
Demonstrators
Demand Fairness to Animals by WTO
By the
Animal Welfare Institute
WASHINGTON, DC (September
9, 2003) Demonstrators from across the globe again will take to the
streets in dolphin costumes on the opening day of the World Trade
Organization’s (WTO) Fifth Ministerial Meeting in Cancun, Mexico, September 10,
demanding unequivocally that the WTO negotiations embrace protection of
wildlife and the humane treatment of animals. Dolphins are the symbolic
poster-child of free trade run amok, as the General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade (GATT), the WTO’s predecessor, twice ruled
against the United States’
wise law preventing dolphin-deadly tuna from entering the US
market.
“Ministers attending the
1999 Seattle WTO meeting were met by hundreds of citizens dressed as sea
turtles to protest WTO decisions against laws designed to protect these highly
endangered marine creatures,” said AWI’s Ben White,
coordinator of the massive dolphin demonstration. “Like sea turtles, dolphins
represent the oppressiveness of the current global trade regime, where laws to
prevent the importation of dolphin deadly tuna are at constant risk of foreign
challenge.”
Put simply, AWI advocates
inclusion of animal welfare and endangered species protection in all trade
negotiations, recommends that no country be empowered to challenge another
nations’ animal protection laws, and urges countries never to weaken laws
enacted to protect animals despite the mandates of trade agreements.
“American animal
protection laws have been enacted historically with the overwhelming support of
the American public,” noted AWI Senior Research Associate, Adam Roberts.
“Unelected, unaccountable trade bureaucrats in Geneva should not be empowered to demand
changes to our sovereign national decisions.”
A specific focus of the Cancun negotiations is agricultural trade. “We are
terribly concerned that the United States Trade Representative will continue
working behind the scenes to open up the global market even further for
products from barbaric animal factories here in the United States,” said Wendy Swann, AWI’s Research Associate for Farm Animals. “If the US succeeds, countless pigs, cows, and other
livestock with suffer tremendous cruelty by corporate agribusiness, while the US floods the
global market with cheap meat, undercutting the ability of local family farmers
to subsist.” Instead, AWI supports including animal welfare under the
protected “greenbox” subsidies, which are protected
from WTO pressure.
For additional
information, please see: http://awionline.org/freetrade/
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Editor’s
Notes:
- Under the rules of the WTO
and the NAFTA, member states cannot control the traffic of any commodity
based solely on the way it is created—what is referred to as “process
and production methods.” Essentially, nations should not discriminate
against “like products.”
- The most famous (perhaps
infamous) case concerning animals is related to canned tuna fish. In an
effort to protect dramatically declining populations of dolphins, the United States
prohibited importation of tuna that was caught using nets that are
cruelly set on dolphins. A number of countries in Latin
America objected to this import ban. They argued that a can
of tuna is a can of tuna, regardless of the “process” by which the tuna
was obtained. In the world of the GATT, the NAFTA, and the WTO, it
doesn’t matter that one can contains tuna caught by harassing and
killing dolphins, while another involved no harm to dolphins. The final
product—the canned tuna—is the same.
- The tuna-dolphin dispute,
though the defining case of the impact of free trade agreements on
animals is not the only example. The European Union has been undermined
in its efforts to prohibit the import of furs from animals who were caught using the barbaric steel jaw leghold trap. [A fur is a fur regardless of how the
animal was treated.] The US
had to undergo years of international litigation to defend its policies
regarding the importation of shrimp from countries whose shrimp trawlers
do not employ Turtle Excluder Devices, which allow highly endangered sea
turtles to escape the shrimp nets that would otherwise drown the
turtles. [Shrimp is shrimp regardless of the fishing method and its
impact on other species.] Meanwhile, the European Union is fighting to
maintain its wise ban on importation of beef from cows injected with
growth hormones, which are used in American animal factories to increase
beef and dairy production. [Meat is meat whether potentially tainted or
not by use of these hormones.]
- In addition to the “like
product” issue, these trade agreements promote identical “national
treatment.” Under these pacts, it is unacceptable to treat the products
of one country different than those of another country. So, if one
country engages in a practice that is harmful to animals, nations cannot
prohibit the import of products from that country while allowing similar
products from other countries that do not engage in the destructive
activity.
- Notably, the WTO
incorporates language from the GATT that allows for some exemptions from
the trade rules under these agreements. National laws may contravene the
WTO, for instance, if they are “necessary to protect human, animal or
plant life or health,” or if they relate “to the conservation of exhaustible
natural resources….” In order for either of these exemptions to apply,
however, the measure in question must not be “applied in a manner which
would constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination
between countries where the same conditions prevail, or a disguised
restriction on international trade.”
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