Greens trying to sway Australian trade policy

TRADE officials in Indonesia would be entitled to wonder who has a greater say in trade relations with Indonesia – the Australian government or environmental campaigners?
The environmental campaigners are currently making more noise on trade policy.
They have been prodding the Australian government into taking trade actions that would effectively reduce agricultural and forestry exports from Indonesia.
This would undermine economic growth – particularly in rural regions.
Campaigns by groups such as Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network and the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) to put curbs on the commodities trade are nothing new. All have a history of opposing free trade.
The most recent example is a push by campaigners to have the Australian government hold an official inquiry into food labelling.
The aim of the push is to eventually have palm oil – but not other similar vegetable oils – discriminated against in Australian markets.
The Indonesian trade ministry last week made its opposition to this clear in two submissions to the Australian government. 
The inquiry is the culmination of a long and orchestrated campaign to curb palm oil exports.
The campaign has also drawn in the support of three Australian zoos. 
The zoos now contend that the palm oil industry has been, and remains, the leading destroyer of orang utan habitat.
They should have checked the facts before repeating everything the environmental campaigners told them.
The UN has reported that increases in land use for purposes other than palm oil expansion have been much sharper.
There has been a marked rise in the expansion of urban areas, prompted by Indonesia’s high population growth. 
Up until five years ago, Greenpeace was blaming commercial forestry and illegal logging for large-scale habitat loss – not palm oil.
Even then they were wrong, and consciously so.
UN bodies such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation and Framework Convention on Climate Change have been attesting for years that globally no more than 20% of deforestation is for conversion to large-scale commercial agriculture.
Like most hastily conceived ideas, it cannot work.
Such a measure is likely to fall afoul of World Trade Organisation (WTO) law.
The WTO requires trade restrictions designed to protect the environment to contribute directly to combating the environmental problem.
Groups that have attempted to manage conservation areas in Indonesia – such as WWF – would understand that. 
WWF has had immense problems with local communities and enforcement in its own conservation projects in Sumatra.
It has also had problems with illegal logging – the subject of another Australian current campaign against Indonesian exports.
The Australian government made an election promise in 2007 to take ban imports of “illegal” timber.
This is premised upon the Green assertion that most forestry within the Asia-Pacific region is illegal.
The Australian government response to this trade politicking has been curious.
Standing policy rejects trade measures on environmental grounds.
Australia has consistently opposed the use of environmental trade bans.
It also strongly supports expansion of trade with its neighbors and has proposed new trade agreements with Indonesia, Malaysia and PNG.
Yet on the trade restrictions aimed at important Indonesian exports, it has been silent.

*The writer  is a former Australian ambassador to the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, the predecessor of the WTO and is chairman of World Growth, a free market NGO based in Washington. He is also managing director of ITS Global, a consulting firm on international governmental and multilateral activities