But as Brazil's environment minister Reuben Ricupero retorts, making paper from recycled materials causes other hazards by the use of chemicals to bleach out the inks. Suggestions that 'environmentally preferable products' should be labelled, are no easier to define. US cars use half as much fuel as they did 20 years ago to travel any given distance. But in fact because the cars are cheaper to run, US cars are on average used to travel twice as far. So the amount of fuel consumed has not decreased.
Free trade promotes consumption.
Solutions that are truly environmentally friendly need to reduce consumption to sensible levels. For as GATT environmental director Richard Eglin points out 'This is a government's agenda, not an activist's agenda'. Pratap Chatterjee is the Washington correspondent for Inter-Press Service. A soft-spoken professor of public administration from the University of the Philippines, it is hard to imagine Leonor Briones as a warrior against the ravages of structural adjustment. Affectionately known as Liling to her friends, her day takes her far from the ivory towers of academe.