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Profits before whales! To know why TTIP would be a nightmare, look to Canada Updated for 2026

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If anyone tries to convince you that TTIP is no threat to a government’s ability to protect its people, just point them to Canada.

Last week, Canada’s government was successfully sued for daring to turn down a large mining quarry which threatened to cause environmental damage in Nova Scotia.

It is the latest in a long line of cases which have been brought against Canada for attempting to introduce environmental protection, under NAFTA – the North America Free Trade Agreement. These cases have been brought about under exactly the same mechanism – known as ISDS (Investor State Dispute Settlement) – which is at the centre of the TTIP deal.

ISDS is essentially a corporate court system – allowing foreign corporations to sue governments in secret tribunals, overseen by corporate lawyers, with no right of appeal. Even winning can cost a country a small fortune in legal costs.

Canada has to pay $100s of millions in ‘compensation’

The most recent ruling focuses on Canada’s decision, following an environmental review, to block the White’s Point 152-hectare basalt quarry on Digby Neck in Nova Scotia – which happens to be a key breeding area for cetaceans, increasingly popular among whale-watchers.

Among the species regularly frequenting nearby waters are Finback Whales, Minke Whales, Harbor Porpoises, Humpback Whales, Whitesided Dolphins, the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale, and there have been sightings of Pilot, Beluga, Sei, Sperm Whales and Orcas.

US corporation Bilcon wanted to open the quarry and argued that it had put time and money into the development. The province’s environmental review, however, found that the project clashed with “community core values“, and the quarry blasting and shipping movements would be detrimental to the area’s cetaceans.

The company argued that the government shouldn’t even have resorted to an environmental review. It has now won its case before the NAFTA arbitration panel, which ruled in its 260-page judgment that Bilcon was “denied a fair environmental hearing”. It is now demanding $300 million in compensation.

Two aspects of this case prove what critics have always said about these corporate courts. First, the case didn’t relate to a breach of contract or to discrimination in favour of a domestic company. It simply related to a regulation which a foreign corporation didn’t like.

Second, the case is a challenge to Canada’s ability to make decisions based on environmental protection, as pointed out by the one dissenting voice in this tribunal, that of Ottawa law professor Donald McRae who warned:

“A chill will be imposed on environmental review panels which will be concerned not to give too much weight to socio-economic considerations or other considerations of the human environment in case the result is a claim for damages under NAFTA.”

The ruling, he continued “will be seen as a remarkable step backwards in environmental protection” and a “significant intrusion into domestic jurisdiction.”

Environmental protection subordinate to corporate profit

Canada has been sued for environmental protection regulations again and again. Previous cases include Canada being taken to task for attempting to ban the import of toxic waste and for trying to prohibit dangerous chemical MMT from petrol. In the latter case, Canada reversed its ban.

And only days before the Bilcon ruling, Canada had a $17.3-million award made against it for a regulation which required oil giant Exxon Mobil and Murphy Oil (along with other offshore oil producers) to invest some of their profits from offshore drilling in the local economy.

It has been suggested that unless the requirement is withdrawn, this will be the tip of the iceberg in terms of ‘compensation’ – another example of a completely moderate and sensible government regulation being threatened by unelected, unaccountable corporate lawyers. 

It is often claimed that these corporate courts ‘only’ effect developing countries with dubious standards of law. That would be bad enough, but Canada is not a developing country, yet has lost millions of dollars to these corporate courts after signing an investment deal like TTIP with the US. These cases should be instructive to European governments.

The European Commission is keen to tell us that they are reforming the corporate court procedure for TTIP, so there’s no need to worry. But from what we’ve seen of such reforms to date, they may actually make matters worse. Veteran investment arbitrator Todd Weiler said of the reformed system:

“I love it, the new Canadian-EU treaty … we used to have to argue about all of those [foreign investor rights] … And now we have this great list. I just love it when they try to explain things.”

In the UK, the political divide is laid bare

In a ground-breaking report, the House of Commons Business Select Committee came out today saying it wasn’t convinced of the need for the corporate court system. Against them are ranged Conservatives and Liberal Democrats who support TTIP and its ISDS provisions, often with great enthusiasm.

Lobbying of MPs and MEPs has shown that Labour representatives are looking for significant reform of ISDS before they will be persuaded to vote for CETA or TTIP, while Green Party, SNP and UKIP MEPs are voting against the deal.

It has recently been flagged by a number of US Senate Democrats as a reason to oppose TTIP. 

Negotiations on TTIP between the EU and the US are continuing, amid reports of “problems” over the inclusion of ISDS in the agreement. In an earlier public consultation on ISDS in TTIP, over 150,000 respondents participated – 97% of them opposing ISDS. The next round of negotiations will take place in Washington DC in the week starting 20th April.

Canada’s experience shows why it’s important for progressive politicians to stick to their guns – and for those now supporting ISDS to rethink their position. The corporate court system fundamentally challenges our ability to protect the environment. However you reform it, it has no role in a democratic society.

 

 

Action: an International Day of Action against all ‘free trade’ deals is planned for Saturday 18 April in association with Stop TTIP.

Sign an EU-wide petition against TTIP – it already has 1.6 million signatures and has a target of 2 million by October 2015.

Nick Dearden is director of the Global Justice Now (formerly World Development Movement), and former director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign.

This article is an updated version of one first published by Global Justice Now.

 

 




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Take bushmeat off the menu before humans are served another ebola Updated for 2026

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A few weeks ago I was visiting a colleague in Brazil who told me he had a new post-doctoral researcher working for him from West Africa, but that he was in 21 days quarantine.

I asked him if the newest member of his staff was in the university’s hospital; he replied “no”, he is wandering around the streets of the city until his 21 days are up – he is just not allowed on the campus.

As disease researchers know the great problem of the modern era is transport: since the times of our great-grandfathers human ability to traverse the planet has increased exponentially. And the risk of disease epidemics such as ebola has followed.

The present ebola crisis appears, like HIV before it, to have started with the disease jumping from a wild species, in this case bats, to humans.

A long evolutionary battle

Ebola and bats have been battling out an evolutionary war for thousands of years and have more or less come to a stalemate whereby bats are infected and the virus can reproduce itself, but bats are not killed.

A similar situation is seen in the case of simian retroviruses (SIV), the precursors of HIV. Both come about from the arms race that occurs between a disease and its host: if lions start to run faster then so do their prey, otherwise the prey and ultimately the lion will go to extinction.

These wars between diseases and their hosts can be found everywhere on the planet.

But what about the native people who live in forests? Surely they have been fighting this same evolutionary arms race with these same diseases. The answer is perhaps not. Studies of the Ache tribe of hunter gathers in Paraguay show that they do not hunt species indiscriminately.

While their jungle home contains thousands of potential animal species to consume, they basically focus on eating only twelve.

The items on their menu are selected in terms of their energetic profitability; that is, the minimum amount of search time for the maximum amount of calories. In this case the favoured food item is the armadillo.

Historically hunter gather tribes were small and widely dispersed. Thus, if they did get ebola everyone might have died but there would have been little transmission to other groups of humans – and no epidemic. Agriculture changes everything, as large well-connected groups can easily transmit diseases.

Jumping the species barrier

It is also worth remembering that diseases can jump the species barrier in both directions. About five years ago in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte all of the wild urban marmosets in one area died out due to cold sore infections. Cold sores are caused by a herpes virus.

This outbreak probably started unintentionally when a person with a cold sore gave a fruit they were eating to some marmosets. Disease transmission is very much a two-way street and there is increasing evidence of human diseases passing on to wildlife, especially primates.

Wild animals hunted and eaten in tropical forests are known as bushmeat – and bushmeat represents a crisis of its own, as hunting threatens to make many species of wildlife extinct. The crisis has its origins in poverty. People simply need to eat animals to survive, a situation that is made worse by deforestation and the fragmentation of natural habitats.

There is the often romanticised view of native peoples as conservationists since they are generally not thought to have made animal species go extinct. But this situation is more to do with their limited technology and small populations relative to their environment, rather than because native people live in an ecologically friendly manner.

As their traditional forests are hit, and the easy pickings dry up, eventually the menu of such people will need to include new less energetically profitable food. And access to technology such as firearms can make previously unattainable prey available.

Today’s bushmeat trade is about profit, not survival

Much of the modern bushmeat trade is no longer connected to native people needing to exploit wildlife as a food resource, but the descendants of these people who have developed a taste for the food.

It is for this reason that several hundred tonnes of bushmeat enter Europe each year, where its illegality has made it a status symbol in some sections of society.

Part of the problem with this trade in bushmeat is that judges in the countries where the hunting takes place often, naïvely, believe the hunter’s pleas of poverty and just ‘smack them on the wrists’.

But research in the north-east of Brazil has proven conclusively that hunting birds for food is much more expensive than buying chicken from the supermarket. Humans spent the past few thousand years breeding chickens, cows and pigs for a reason: they make a nicer, cheaper and less dangerous dinner than bats, gorillas or armadillos.

Unfortunately, the threat of picking up a dreadful disease from bushmeat may not save these animals from extinction. A few years ago there was a yellow fever outbreak in Brazil and it was announced on the television that monkeys can be a host for this disease: this led to the killing of wild urban primates in some cities.

If humans continue to increase the items on their bushmeat menu then we can expect more diseases like ebola and HIV to appear.

 

 

Robert Young is Professor of Wildlife Conservation at the University of Salford. He does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

 




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Fish before agribusiness! California river tribes demand water Updated for 2026

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Hundreds of Tribal members and supporters from the Trinity and Klamath Rivers are protesting this week at the Bureau of Reclamation in Sacramento this week to demand increased water flows to prevent a mass killing of wild Chinook salmon.

‘Preventative flows’ are desperately needed from Lewiston Dam into the Trinity River, the largest tributary of the Klamath River, they said.

Campaigners also asked that more water be let out of Iron Gate Dam on the Klamath – and denounced Reclamation’s recent decision to withhold emergency releases until large numbers of adult salmon die.

They say that emergency flow releases from Lewiston Dam would take four days to reach the struggling Klamath River salmon – leaving few if any survivors.

Large scale fish kill is now ‘likely’

Fisheries biologists agree that by the time the emergency flows are triggered and the water has traveled from the dam, it would be too late to prevent a large-scale fish die-off.

“Klamath River flows are lower than they were during the 2002 fish kill”, says Nat Pennington, Fisheries Biologist for the Salmon River Restoration Council.

“River temperatures are consistently higher than the acute stress level for Chinook salmon at 72 degrees Fahrenheit. If this trend continues, a large-scale fish kill is likely and the Klamath could loose the entire run.”

And tribal members say Reclamation is ignoring the beginning stages of a disaster. “Fish are pooled up at cold water tributaries because the water in the river is so warm and polluted”, said Hoopa Valley Tribal member, Kayla Brown.

“These fish are diseased and dying. Once the disease starts to spread, it can’t be stopped and we will have a fish kill on our hands, courtesy of the Bureau of Reclamation.”

According to the Klamath Fish Health Assessment Team, much of the Klamath River and its tributaries are on an ‘orange’ alert level, signifying high temperatures, a critically dry water year designation, and increased fish mortality. “A die-off is imminent and management levels in agencies need to be alerted.”

Wild salmon before agribusiness irrigation!

The protestors said they support Klamath River fisheries biologists’ assertion that a minimum of 2,500 cubic feet per second be maintained near the mouth of the Klamath River. This can be achieved if the Bureau of Reclamation approves preventative releases from the Lewiston Dam reservoir.

When the dams and diversion tunnels were built on the Trinity, laws were set up to protect the river and fish, before exporting water to the Central Valley. These laws established that fish, and the tribes that depend on them, are the top priority for the Trinity River flows.

But currently, five times more water is diverted to the Sacramento Basin for Central Valley irrigators than is released into the Trinity River. Even at this critical time, the Bureau of Reclamation appears set to ignore the law in order to favour California’s powerful agribusiness interests.

We will not give up our fight for the salmon

Karuk tribal member Molli White said: “Reclamation says they need the water for Sacramento River salmon, but our rivers are actually being exported to meet the demands of corporate agriculture like the Westland’s Water district.”

California’s almond growers are projecting an 8% increase in harvests, he added, while the rest of California experiences a devastating drought year.

“We need these releases now more then ever”, said Frankie Myers of the Yurok Tribe Watershed Restoration Program,

“The Klamath fish kill of 2002 was devastating for our tribal communities and to the West Coast Fisheries. Previously, Tribes, fisheries scientists, and the Department of the Interior have worked together to avert fish kills by releasing preventative flows during drought years.”

Klamath Justice Coalition members have made it clear that Tribal people and traditional fishermen will not give up until Reclamation releases water.

“Historically, the Klamath River was one of the three most productive salmon rivers in America”, according to California’s Friends of the River campaign group. “Today dams, diversions, and other basin activities have caused coho and fall Chinook salmon populations to decline to 10% of historic numbers.”

 

 

Follow the Klamath Justice Coalition on twitter at #releasethewater #savethesalmon #stopafishkill #neveragain

Information about current river conditions and fisheries health.

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