The President’s State of the Union address last night contained a lesser announcement of the launching of a US-EU free trade agreement:

“And tonight, I am announcing that we will launch talks on a comprehensive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the European Union – because trade that is free and fair across the Atlantic supports millions of good-paying American jobs.”

This idea has been floating for some months, pushed more from the European side than the US. The US and EU are already massive trading partners with mostly low tariffs and few serious trade disputes.  Nonetheless, making a trade marriage of it has hurdles.  The crux of the US-EU deal will be regulatory and ‘behind the border’ issues.  For example, both the US and EU have extensive farm subsidies and have been critical of one another.  Europeans have some regulatory measures that US exporters see as problematic. (Think GMOs.)

The question is—do developing countries have a stake in this?

The answer is—they could.

What if both sides committed to embracing the pro-development trade policies of the other to harmonize and improve the trade opportunities for poor countries?  The US has a handful of “trade preference” programs that offer special access to developing countries, like the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), the African Grown and Opportunity Act (AGOA), and regional programs for the Caribbean and Andean countries.  The Europeans have the “Everything But Arms” initiative that offers free export access to least developed countries.

Each side has some pros, and also some cons.  Very broadly, the European program is broader (more products included) and more generous (zero tariffs) than anything the US offers.  But the US programs,  especially AGOA, offer more favorable “rules of origin,” which help poor countries export more complex products like garments, rather than being stuck exporting low-value commodities and products.

Neither the US, nor the EU provide full “duty-free, quota-free” access for all least developed countries (LDCs), which has been a key goal for development advocates in the long-stalled Doha Round trade negotiations.  In fact, LDCs have not seen any of the promised outcomes from the so-called “development round” of the World Trade Organization.  Their request to extend the soon-to-expire exemption to implement intellectual property rules for LDCs has failed to gain support from the US in particular.

If the US and EU want to demonstrate global leadership and do something very positive for the world, they could start by using the trade agreement negotiations to start a “race to the top” in creating economic opportunities for poor countries.

David Waskow is Oxfam America’s climate change program director.

In a year of crippling droughts around the world—from West Africa to the US Midwest—the outcome at the major UN climate negotiation in Doha, Qatar, was itself an unfortunate drought of climate action.

This was a paradoxical COP—both a stepping stone and a cliff-hanger—with developing countries hanging from the finance cliff by their fingertips.  Even though several European countries pledged climate finance for the upcoming 2013-15 period, developed countries were unwilling to commit collectively to any funding level for the upcoming period or clarity about how they’ll ramp up toward the international goal of mobilizing $100 billion a year by 2020.

The United States, arguing that it was constrained by the fiscal cliff budget negotiations, refused even to commit to maintain the funding level of the past three years of ‘fast start’ climate finance agreed during the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009. All the final text says is that developed countries are “encouraged” to maintain fast start levels. Meanwhile, there was little done at Doha to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Qumrunnessa Nazly from Bangladesh held an empty basket amidst a field of dead corn set in front of the glittering Doha skyline to demonstrate the grave impact of a changing climate on food supply and food prices, and the crucial importance of the UN climate change negotiations in providing a solution. Richard Casson/Oxfam.

A few limited but hopeful elements in the Doha outcome: an agreement to convene a high-level dialogue on climate finance at the next COP in 2013; an agreement to work this coming year to develop an international mechanism to address “loss and damage,” the effects of climate change that cannot be adapted to; formal agreement on how some countries, particularly the European Union and Australia, will continue the Kyoto Protocol until 2020; and agreement on the process for negotiating the planned 2015 comprehensive climate agreement that will take effect in 2020.

The US made a verbal commitment to work for climate finance in Congress this coming year and try to continue the finance at current levels. (Todd Stern, the US special climate envoy said that “we have every intention to continue to press forward with funding of that same kind of level, to the greatest extent that we can.”)

But beyond the minimalist outcomes agreed in the texts, one of the most noteworthy outcomes at Doha was the growing strength, breadth, and depth of engagement and collaboration by civil society organizations. A press conference last week demonstrated this growing collaboration:  Oxfam, WWF, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Christian Aid, and ActionAid, with the chairs of the Least Developed Country and Africa negotiating groups, stood together to say that the climate talks were failing to produce meaningful change and that governments needed to shift gears dramatically.  Representing a range of perspectives, their joint statement was not just a marriage of tactical convenience—it demonstrates a real confluence around jointly shared objectives of equity and sustainability, with climate issues a central, though hardly the sole, issue.

Perhaps most important, advocates are shifting focus toward the national and local levels and bridging or even bypassing the old divides between development and environmental agendas. There’s a strong belief that this increased energy and action will eventually also flow upward back into the global level process. And home-grown advocacy on climate change is already blossoming in many developing countries. This came home for me while working with developing country partners from Nepal, Philippines, Uganda, and Zambia, partners in a new initiative to press for adaptation finance that’s accountable at the local level. They have been building strong civil society networks over the past several years and are pressing effectively for national level policy change, as well as engaging the international process.  For these groups and many others in developing countries, building advocacy from the ground up and seeing past environment-development divides are self-evident truths.

The pump is primed to water our advocacy from these sources. But there’s also an immediate question about the focus of our advocacy agenda in the US—especially on the climate finance front in coming months. We must work for robust levels of climate funding at least at the level of the past several years, joined to a public recommitment by the administration to the President’s Global Climate Change Initiative.  And we must seize opportunities to push forward on innovative sources of finance, such as a mechanism for international aviation that can limit emissions while producing financial resources.

Doha was parched—but there are oases on the horizon that we can and must move towards.

This update by David Waskow, climate change program director, comes from Doha the morning of December 7, 2012.

We’re heading into the final hours of what has been a paradoxical COP. On the one hand, it’s a transitional COP, a stepping stone for the process launched last year that’s supposed to lead to a comprehensive climate agreement in 2015. On the other hand, it’s a cliffhanger COP because the thee year Fast Start climate finance period that developed countries agreed to in Copenhagen in 2009 is coming to an end in several weeks and developing countries are uncertain about what happens next with finance to help them build climate resilience. As Oxfam has said, we’re facing a climate fiscal cliff.

The result has been a disappointing COP so far—with only limited  progress on the new agreement, along with a serious stalemate on the finance issues. Developing countries are seeking a Doha decision that developed countries will maintain their fast start finance levels and begin to ramp up the funding levels. But despite some pledges of finance by several European counties, there has been very little progress on agreeing to finance commitments here.

As a result, the lack of finance assurances may stymie movement toward the 2015 deal because developing countries want more assurances on finance before they move fully forward. The final hours will be telling. Among other things, will the US agree to maintain the fast start levels of finance over the next three years (essentially $10 billion per year from all developed countries)?

The US did take one important step here in Doha—to recognize the importance of opening a dialogue on some key issues of equity in the negotiations, especially around the level of emissions reductions that different countries would undertake. There does have to be a serious conversation about this, and hopefully the US will engage.

Many negotiators from other countries came to Doha more optimistic about a US administration that had just won reelection. Many are again skeptical as the US continues to stick with positions from before. We’ve been stressing the opportunity the President has to act more assertiveness internationally after his reelection and significantly increased climate awareness after Sandy and this past summer’s drought. The final hours of the negotiations will provide telling answers as to how that will play out.