Charly Poppe (Friends of the Earth Europe) on Radio Mundo Real

One of the programs of ecologist organization Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) is Trade Environment and Sustainability (TES). To learn more about the work done by the organization on this issue, Real World Radio interviewed Charly Poppe, member of the TES campaign of FoEI.

Poppe spoke about FoEI’s actions in Europe, where they focus on the impacts of free trade agreements on the environment, and more recently it has focused on natural resources, especially fisheries, forestry and mining. The organization has monitored the EU policies in an attempt to underscore the strategies used, pressing the bloc to follow alternative paths.

Poppe said he focused on the WTO’s role since it is the agency that rules the global trade flow, where the policies that imply the liberalization of goods and services are discussed. Since multilateral talks came to a standstill over a year ago, FoEI has been monitoring the EU’s attitude towards bilateral trade agreements.

In this way they discovered that despite the EU’s discourse mentions multilateral talks, in practice they promote bilateral agreements with other countries. Poppe said in October of 2006 the European Union outlined a new trade strategy called “Global Europe”. As part of this new strategy the bloc claims it can become more competitive. For this purpose it needs to open more markets to new areas such as natural resources.

Poppe said this is a threat because it increases the number and scope of the free trade agreements, and it implements other kinfs of policies and strategies to deregulate the economy even more, both within and outside the European Union.

Poppe also explained that since December of 2006 the EU proposed its member countries to start negotiations with new countries such as India, South Korea, ASEAN (made up of Thailand, Indonesia, Philipinnes, Malaysia, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, Singapore and Brunei), and the Andean Community of Nations (made up of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru).

These new agreements are part of the strategy followed by the EU to move forward in market opening (which follows certain paths such as strengthening the intellectual property rules that endanger the traditional knowledge of the communities), so the bilateral agreements are now one of FoEI’s main working areas.

 For more information, please visit http://www.foeeurope.org/trade