• Environmental impacts

Environmental impacts of trade liberalisation

This document provides a synthesis of the integrated assessment studies conducted in the third, most recent, round of country projects commissioned by UNEP, which focused on the rice sector. It provides a detailed analysis of the environmental, social and economic implications of trade liberalisation in the rice sector in China, Colombia, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Senegal and Viet Nam. Some of the main aims of the study were to:

• assess the positive and negative impacts of trade liberalisation
• perform cost-benefit analyses of policy packages
• formulate policy proposals to mitigate negative impacts and enhance positive impacts of trade liberalisation through economic and regulatory instruments and community-based initiatives

Although the very specific social and economic conditions of each country studied meant that each case study was very different, the following broad findings are reported:

• there is a greater incentive to increase the use of agro-chemicals to achieve short-term production increases is clear, although the level of use varies according to country. This has driven up the price of agro-chemicals
• use of the chemicals often results in serious environmental impacts such as soil degradation, water pollution and loss of biodiversity, particularly in cases of very high use
• irrigated rice production uses much more water than rain-fed rice production as well as other crops that are less water demanding, and may thus compete with alternative uses of scarce water
• virtually all country teams cited changes in land use provoked by trade liberalisation, causing environmental damage. Changes include converting rice producing areas to nonagricultural use
• another impact is the loss of cultivated and wild biodiversity, because of the trend towards monoculture, and also because forests and wetlands are being cleared to make way for agricultural production
• the poor were always the hardest hit by the negative effects of trade liberalisation in terms of food security, income and employment

Next steps suggested by the report are:

• develop guidelines and procedures to systematically apply integrated assessment to development issues, since at present decision makers ignore environmental and social consequences
• in terms of the integration and comparison of important economic, social and environmental impacts, appropriate tools and greater experience in their use are needed

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