THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release
December 8, 1999

PRESS CONFERENCE BY THE PRESIDENT

Dean Acheson Auditorium
The State Department

[excerpt]

Q Mr. President, some of your critics have suggested that the reason that you pressed the issues of the environment and labor at the WTO meeting in Seattle is to benefit the presidential candidacy of Vice President Gore, knowing that there might be a backlash from the developing nations. How do you respond to that?

THE PRESIDENT: That's wrong. And I would like to make two comments -- one on the WTO ministerial meeting, and secondly on that general issue .

The Uruguay Round was launched in 1986. The trade ministers started trying to launch it in 1982. It took them four years to get it off the ground. The fundamental reason a new round was not launched here had, in my judgment, very little to do with my philosophy of trade, which I'll talk about in a moment. There were -- the big blocks here were the Europeans and the Japanese, on the one hand -- the United States and the developing nations, we all had positions that couldn't be reconciled. The Europeans were not prepared at this time to change their common agricultural policy, which accounts for 85 percent of the export subsidies in the world. The Japanese have their own agricultural and other issues to deal with.

The United States was not prepared to change its policy on dumping, because -- and I think the recent Asian financial crisis justified that, I might add. Even though we did finally move under our dumping laws, and we had to move, to try to keep our steel industry, which took down 60 percent of its employment and modernized during the '80s and the early '90s, we still bought 10 times as much steel during that crisis as the Europeans did.

The recent WTO agreement we made with China protects us from surges and unfair dumping. We have the largest trade deficit in the world. Now, we get a lot of good out it -- we get low inflation, we get goods from all over the world. But there has to be some sense of fairness and balance here.

And the developing nations, for their part, felt that they had not yet gotten enough benefits from the last trade round and the entry into the WTO. They think that we and everybody else -- the Europeans, the Japanese, everybody -- they think we ought to have more open markets for agricultural products, which doesn't affect America so much, and for textiles, which does affect us. That's the big issue being negotiated still with the Caribbean Basin and the Africa Trade initiative.

So it's very important that you understand that there were real differences that we thought we could bridge, unrelated to labor and the environment, which we couldn't; and which I think would have been clearer, but for the backdrop of the demonstrations in Seattle over these other issues.

Now, to your second question. When I ran for President in 1992, and the big issue being debated was NAFTA, I said that I wanted to be for NAFTA, I would fight hard for it, but I felt strongly there ought to be provisions on labor and the environment in the agreement. And those provisions were included. I have always had what I guess you would call a third way position on trade. I think the position of Americans, including some in my party, that trade is bad for America and bad for the world, is just dead wrong.

I think that the world is more prosperous and I know America is more prosperous because of the continuing integration of the world's economy and the mutual interdependence of people, and people being able to produce what they produce best in a competitive environment -- including costs. And I think we benefit, not just from our exports, but from the imports. That's what I believe. I believe we will have both a more prosperous and a more peaceful world if we have more of the right kind of globalization.

I read -- one of the many, many articles that's been written in the last several days in the aftermath of Seattle pointed out that many of the world's most troubled places -- the Balkans, the Caucasus, Africa, to some extent the Middle East -- suffer because they have too little economic interconnection with the rest of the world.

I believe, even though I'm proud of the role that we've played and especially proud of the role George Mitchell played in the Irish peace settlement, I think it is unlikely that we would have done that if, also, Ireland didn't have the fastest-growing economy in Europe and Northern Ireland weren't growing and people didn't imagine that they could have a totally different life if they just let go of what they've been fighting over.

So the people who don't believe that trade is good, I just think they're wrong. Now, having said that, I think that as the world grows more interdependent, it is unrealistic to think that there will be an international economic policy with rules unrelated to an emerging international consensus on the environment, and an international consensus on labor. That does not mean that I would cut off our markets to India and Pakistan, for example, if they didn't raise their wages to American levels. I know that's what the sort of stated fear was. I never said that, I don't believe that.

But I think that -- let me give you an analogy. Several years ago, the Europeans did this, and I applaud them -- they were actually the impetus for protecting intellectual property more than the United States was -- and people debated that for years -- why, intellectual property has no place in trade bills. Who cares if people are pirating books and selling them for 60 cents apiece when they cost $20 somewhere else. And now, we just take it as a given.

And it's a good thing for the United States. You think about all the software we're exporting, all the CDs we're exporting, all the things -- intellectual property is a big deal to us now. It was just as alien a subject a few years ago to trade talks as questions of labor and the environment are today.

So I think I've got a good position here. It has nothing to do with this campaign. It's a position I've had for years. And I believe the world will slowly come to it. We do have to be sensitive to the developing countries. We cannot say that, you know, you're out of here because you can't have the same labor environment we do. But we also have to -- all we ask for was to start a dialogue within the WTO on trade issues. On the environment, all we ask is, is that the decision-making process not degrade the environment when countries have environmental policies and interests, and just blithely override them because there's an immediate, short-term economic benefit.

I think that's right. And I believe that 10 years from now, somebody will be sitting here, and we'll all take it for granted that we've come a long way in integrating trade and the environment -- I mean, trade and labor. That's what I think, and that's what I believe.