Trade Pact Comes Under Attack From Environmentalists : Border: Complaints run counter to Bush Administration’s optimistic report on potential impact of agreement.

Opponents of the U.S.-Mexico free-trade agreement Friday lambasted the Bush Administration’s review of the agreement’s environmental impacts, calling a study released this week skewed and incomplete.

The 199-page “Review of U.S.-Mexico Environmental Issues,” although conceding that increased trade and development could worsen existing pollution problems along the nearly 2,000-mile border, presented a predominantly optimistic view, claiming that economic growth could help raise the funds needed to solve those problems.

“Completion and implementation of the (agreement) . . . is likely to strengthen the two countries’ commitment to cross-border environmental cooperation, while allowing the Mexican Government to obtain additional resources for environmental protection and infrastructure development,” said the review.

U.S. Trade Representative Carla A. Hills said in a statement: “The elimination of trade and investment barriers through a (free-trade agreement) can have important environmental benefits. Economic growth can generate resources to address longstanding environmental problems.”

Environmental Protection Agency administrator William Reilly was similarly optimistic.

“This Administration is already working with Mexico on concrete action to improve environmental conditions along the border,” he said in a statement. “No one could ask for a stronger, more committed ally in this endeavor than President Salinas of Mexico.”

Critics noted, however, that the review, conducted by an interagency task force coordinated by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, failed to specify how much those solutions would cost or where those resources would come from.

“This review whets your appetite for a real environmental impact statement,” said Michael McCloskey, chairman of the Sierra Club. “They act as if, ‘We now have a new secret remedy here called cooperation that will solve all these problems.’ But is there anything to make any of this happen? Any enforcement? Any teeth? Any money? You begin to see the emperor has no clothes on.”

Craig Merrilees, director of the Fair Trade Campaign, a consortium of consumer, labor and environmental groups on both sides of the border that oppose the agreement, agreed.

“The report pretends that this will allow Mexico to have a tough system of enforcement and environmental regulation,” he said. “But there’s nothing in the plan other than good intentions to make that happen. Good intentions don’t make a cleaner environment. It takes money, a political crackdown and the threat of jail.”

Administration officials have argued that, with exports providing a bigger and bigger share of America’s overall growth, the United States must work to lower trade barriers wherever possible. A North American free-trade zone, they say, could create a competitive trading bloc such as those in Europe and Asia, while also aiding Mexico in its pursuit of environmental, political and economic reform.

But, after the unveiling of this week’s environmental study, Lori Wallach, a staff attorney for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch, said it appears the Administration is simply “going through the motions.”

Wallach’s group, joined by the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth, has filed suit seeking to force the Administration to file a formal environmental impact statement that meets the stiffer specifications of the National Environmental Policy Act. The suit is still pending.

“It’s a pretty sad state of affairs,” she said Friday. “We’re suing them to make them comply with existing law. We’re not out there on the cutting edge. We’re just saying, ‘Tell us what will happen in the U.S. under this agreement.’ ”

Merrilees called the review “an Alice in Wonderland environmental report.”

“There are all sorts of wild conclusions that are drawn, and the most basic one is that more industrial development will make for a cleaner environment in Mexico,” he said, noting that the review often seemed to assume both that growth inevitably leads to improvements in infrastructure and that existing laws are being complied with.

“Increased demand for water may also lead to enhanced water treatment,” says the review’s executive summary. In a section about hazardous wastes, the report continues, “Mexican law currently requires that hazardous wastes from maquiladora industries be returned to the U.S. for recycling or treatment.”

Merrilees said, “But we know it’s not happening in the vast majority of the companies that are operating there. So again, more fantasy.”

McCloskey said that, after skimming the Administration’s environmental review, he is more determined than ever to push ahead in court.

The review “starts to shed light on what is at stake. However, the alternatives it examines are self-serving. . . . It fails to look at how the environment would be best served in the whole process,” he said. The review is “skewed,” he said, because it analyzes only two alternatives: “what the Administration wants to do versus doing nothing.”