COMMENT
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developing countries, and officials from these countries were
provided with a
fait accompli
for evading their responsibilities for
correcting these problems.
At the same time, the conservative position on this issue
appears to favor a laissez-faire approach and ignores the usual inter–
dependence of the problems posed by conflicts in regulating
international trade in hazardous products: in addition to the
boomerang effect, whereby products contaminated with pesticides
we have banned return to us in imported food, there is also the risk
that the misuse of certain hazardous products poses to the global
food supply because of their deleterious effect upon soil productivity.
While enacting tighter export controls, as the liberals propose, will
not remedy either of these problems, nor appreciably reduce the
dangers posed by hazardous products to the populations in the
developing countries, the conservative angle-that business knows
best what is good for the country - is equally ineffective and ignores
the very serious problems that exist in this area.
A more pragmatic and effective approach would be to recog–
nize, as the liberals did not, that the developing countries' priorities
differ from ours - that is, that environmental regulation is generally
considered an expendable luxury at their stage of development - and
to acknowledge, as the conservatives so far have not, the degree to
which our own economic self-interest and well-being depends upon
better regulation in these countries. With this in mind, we could
then devise trade agreements or other measures to encourage the
upgrading of regulation in the developing countries. For example, in
the case of the use of banned pesticides, we could tighten our
enforcement on food imports, thus providing an indirect dis–
incentive for the use of banned pesticides in the Third World; or we
could provide certain trade incentives, either in the form of lowered
tariff barriers or as subsidies to encourage the use of higher priced,
less potentially dangerous chemicals. At the same time, the inter–
national agencies and the large environmental-action lobbying
groups could direct public attention toward the problems that
prevail in the Third World because of lax regulations and could
provide more in the line of direct technical assistance, rather than
guidelines and recommendations, which are useless without
regulatory machinery to back them up.
The point here is that - as with other foreign policy issues with
respect to the Third World-the genuine issues, as well as the
solutions to this problem, were obscured. Often, it seems, we fail to
perceive where real problems lie in the developing countries, or we
