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While growth in trade, foreign investment, and economic relationships among countries can bring significant benefits, the process of economic globalization is also leading to serious problems. Trade rules are clashing with environmental standards, undermining national environmental protections. The income gap between rich and poor continues to grow. Forests, fisheries and other treasures of the world's natural heritage are overexploited as they are subjected to global market demands.
CIEL's Trade Program seeks to reform the global framework of economic law, policy and institutions in order to create a more balanced global economy that is environmentally sustainable and beneficial to all people in a more equitable way. The program seeks to ensure that international environmental rules are developed and applied effectively without interference from international trade rules, that trade rules and institutions take account of their environmental impacts without intruding on regulatory areas that are properly the subject of environmental institutions.
CIEL helps to achieve these goals through legal research and analysis,
training and support, and outreach to policymakers, media, and other NGOs.
Working through both our Geneva and Washington offices, CIEL is able to
monitor both the U.S. government positions and the World Trade Organization
itself.
Examine recent announcements regarding trade and the environment.
Headquartered in Washington since 1990, CIEL opened an office in Geneva in 1995 to focus on the World Trade Organization, where international trade rules are negotiated, monitored, and enforced.
Intellectual property rules fundamentally affect sustainable development. Intellectual property rights, as temporary privileges over the products of intellectual activity, determine who controls information and technology. To ensure intellectual property rights act as a tool rather than as an obstacle for sustainable development, CIEL works with developing country governments and non-governmental organizations to include sustainable development concerns in current multilateral rules on intellectual property.
Established on January 1, 1995, the WTO provides a forum for implementing the multilateral trading system, negotiating new trade agreements and resolving trade disputes. The Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization incorporates the original General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) which continues to apply to issues not covered by the more specific agreements negotiated during the Uruguay Round. CIEL is seeking to participate in the WTO dispute settlement system in order to ensure that international trade law and policymaking respect and do not conflict with principles of sustainable development.
Multilateral Environmental Agreements
A critical issue in the trade and environment debate is the relationship between trade rules and multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), such as the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, the Biodiversity Convention, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, and the Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants signed in May, 2001.
Negotiations to form a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) began in December 1994 in Miami at the Summit of the Americas with the goal of concluding negotiations by 2005. CIEL worked in partnership with organizations throughout the hemisphere to organize a People's Forum for the 1998 Summit of the Americas.
Proceed to view information on how trade impacts various aspects of biodiversity world-wide.
Ecolabeling and Genetically Modified
Organisms (GMOs)
CIEL is working to educate governmental officials on the importance of ecolabeling and the impact of trade rules on such labeling schemes. CIEL also advises citizens' groups, such as the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM) and the Consumer's Choice Council (CCC), on the potential impact of trade rules on ecolabeling.
International investment is eclipsing trade as an engine of growth and is having equally dramatic effects on progress towards sustainable development.
Proceed to view CIEL's publications regarding trade and the environment.
Proceed to view trade-related links.
Contacts for More Information:
In Geneva, Switzerland: Nathalie Bernasconi
(nbernasconi@ciel.org) or Dalindyebo
Shabalala (dshabalala@ciel.org)
In Washington, DC, United States: Marcos
Orellana (morellana@ciel.org)
or Sofia Plagakis.
Funding for the Trade & Sustainable Program has been provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the South Centre/Swedish International Development Agency, the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment, the United Nations Environment Programme, the South Centre/Ford Foundation, and the World Wildlife Fund International.
This page last modified on 16 November 2007