U.S. Will Not Sign Wildlife, Habitat Treaty

Dealing a serious blow to an environmental and development summit about to convene in Brazil, the Bush Administration decided Friday against signing a treaty designed to protect wildlife and its habitat around the world.

The pact, concluded last week in Nairobi, Kenya, is one of two major treaties to be signed during the two-week Earth Summit, which opens Wednesday in Rio de Janeiro.

Since the text of the agreement was completed, Administration officials had made it clear that U.S. approval was unlikely. U.S. officials were concerned that its language would require a broadening of the nation’s Endangered Species Act, already under concentrated attack by business interests and political conservatives.

There was also concern that the treaty would inhibit the burgeoning bio-technology industry in the United States.

Administration officials also took issue with provisions for the transfer of technology to developing nations and for arrangements for financing developing nations’ programs to protect wildlife habitat, such as tropical rain forests.

“We will not sign because there is a fundamental problem on financing,” an Administration official said Friday night, alluding to Washington’s insistence that financing be carried out through existing organizations. A State Department statement said the U.S. believes the treaty contains “unacceptable language on transfer of funds from developed to developing countries.”

The Washington delegation to the talks had also contended that the negotiations were being pushed too fast, simply to complete an agreement in time for signing at Rio de Janeiro.

Left unclear after the U.S. announcement was the question of whether other industrial powers will now decline to sign and whether the United States may be willing to sign at some point after the Rio summit.

Coming less than a month after the United States pressured European nations to relent in their demands for a binding global-warming treaty at the summit, the decision on the bio-diversity treaty is expected to produce a new avalanche of environmental criticism against the Administration.

“This is just another example of the United States’ failure to work with the global community, another message that the United States is out of touch,” said Scott Hajost, international counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund.

Although negotiations on the global-warming treaty captured world attention over the last year, the bio-diversity agreement is closer to the heart of a summit trying to reconcile environmental protection and the efforts of developing nations to achieve economic security.

Because of the crush of human population and world economic development, scientists believe that as many as half of the existing plant and animal species in the world could become extinct before the end of the next century.

The habitats under assault are of compelling interest, for they are the most important centers of biological diversity on Earth.

A huge part of the existing species has yet to be catalogued, scientists point out, and some of those yet to be studied could yield priceless compounds for use against cancer, for example.

The United States’ biotechnology industry, the world leader in a potentially lucrative new generation of technology, lobbied strongly against the treaty.

In a letter to President Bush during the last days of the talks, the Industrial Biotechnology Assn., representing 135 countries, urged that the United States refuse to sign the agreement on grounds that it would weaken patent protection and perhaps spark new regulation of the industry.

Times staff writers Norman Kempster and James Gerstenzang contributed to this story.

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