Sea Turtles Suffer Legal Setback

Sea turtles have had a long hard time surviving the onslaught of people. In many places around the world, sea turtles are caught or their eggs are dug for food. In other places the shells are sought for making tourist trinkets. Elsewhere, nesting beaches are overrun by four-wheel drive vehicles. In resort areas, electric lights disturb sea turtles' navigation and inhibit their use of overlit beaches. Beach houses destroy nesting habitat in some places. Sometimes stupid fishermen shoot turtles for sport. And one of the greatest threats has been the worldwide shrimp industry, which catches sea turtles as by-catch. The turtles die in the shrimp nets.

Last October 12, the World Trade Organization decided that a U.S. law, which sought to protect endangered sea turtles from dying in shrimp nets, discriminated against free trade. The U.S. law worked by requiring foreign shrimpers who want to sell shrimp in the United States to use TEDs-turtle excluder devices-to keep turtles from getting trapped in nets. TEDs provide an escape hatch for the turtles so they can bail out of the net.

According to the excellent analysis of this issue by the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), what upset the WTO was the U.S. State Department's "arbitrary" application of the U.S. law. According to NWF, State was giving Latin American countries three years to comply with the U.S. law, but was only giving Asian countries four months.

NWF expresses concern over the impact of the WTO decision. NWF says that although State didn't handle application of the law properly, NWF thinks the cause lay in the difficulty State had in negotiating the law with all countries at the same time.

NWF explains that the WTO didn't say that the U.S. law wasn't any good, just that the way the U.S. implemented the law wasn't good. The consequences of the WTO finding, as interpreted by NWF, is that while a country can pass a perfectly good law, its implementation of the law also has to be perfectly good if the WTO is going to approve it. The potential impact the NWF sees is that countries like the United States, which want to promote and implement "higher environmental protection standards," will avoid taking action if they cannot see a perfect way to implement laws like the sea turtle protection law.

The Office of U.S. Trade Representative was, at the time the NWF analysis was written in October, deciding how to respond to the WTO decision. That office "can either ignore the WTO's decision, bring our law into compliance, or pay trade reparations to the complaining countries," according to NWF.

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