The Biosafety Protocol: Multilateral Agreement on Protecting the Environment or Protectionist Club?

Abstract

On 11 September 2003, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity (hereafter the Biosafety Protocol (BSP)) entered into force with ratification by the 50th country. It is generally considered to fall into the classification of international arrangement known as multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). While the BSP was negotiated under a veil of environmental respectability, it is, fundamentally, a trade agreement pertaining to agricultural commodities produced using modern biotechnology that is solely concerned with establishing the rules under which countries can limit imports. Further, these rules are crafted in such a way as to allow unfettered restrictions on imports. This leaves the regulation of imports of these products open to influence by a broad range of protectionist interests that have nothing to do with protection of the environment. The result is that the agreement is losing its multilateral inclusivenessÐnone of the major producers and exporters of agricultural crops based on biotechnology (e.g., the United States,1 Canada, Argentina and China) have ratified the Protocol. Hence, there is the possibility that the BSP will become little more than a club of protectionist countries and a failed MEA. This judgment may be too harsh as it is still early days for the BSP but the Protocol and the negotiations leading up to it are a worthy topic for examination given what is at stake. Multilateral environment agreements represent important international instruments to deal with environmental concerns that cannot be dealt with by nation states acting unilaterally. While MEAs are not new (Kerr and Hall, 2003), their importance and number increased considerably in the final decades of the twentieth century as awareness of environmental issues increased and the need for cooperative international action to deal effectively with them was recognized. Important MEAs negotiated in recent years include the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that