Trade and Environment in Asia: Snipping the WTO’s Gordian Knot

Abstract

This chapter argues that developing countries should respond to trade and environment issues and seek to develop a realistic, proactive, and positive agenda of trade liberalization. Rubens Ricupero, then Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), was amongst the first to propose the need for such an agenda, which he did during the 1996 Ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and later elaborated in an UNCTAD (2000) paper. A positive agenda might minimize the possibilities of developing countries being made victims of trade protectionism and increase the prospects of their benefiting from giving due and appropriate attention to environmental issues in the trade context in a concessionary manner. Conversely, a negative agenda—one that lists only wants, without addressing the non-trade concerns of the developed countries—would only perpetuate the impasse in negotiations with the North.

The author gratefully acknowledges his discussions with Joel Trachtman of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and his kind comments on the idea of trade and environment policy review. Useful comments were also provided by Adil Najam and Hugo Cameron. Liu Ping and Jennifer Chien, both Harvard Law School students, provided research assistance, while Hannah Kung, a researcher at the Singapore Institute for International Affairs, helped in editing and updating the paper.