6.1 Where has this taken us?
Looking back over the quarter century just elapsed, it is possible to draw some ten-tative conclusions. Years of research, analysis and debate have led to a much more sophisticated understanding of the trade-environment interface than existed when WTO was founded, and with it the breakdown of the adversarial mind-set that was too common on both sides. Instead, there is now a sense that the issues require a common resolution, as difficult as it may be to encounter these.
Further, it is now established – most recently with the adoption of the 2030 Agenda
25 North American Free Trade Agreement, Ottawa, 11 and 17 December 1992; Mexico D.F., 14 and 17 December 1992; Washington D.C., 8 and 17 December 1992, into force 1 January 1994, available at <https://www.nafta-sec-alena.org/Home/Texts-of-the-Agreement/North-American-Free-Trade-Agree-ment> (visited 21 May 2018).
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Assessing the Trade and Environment Debate after 30 Years:
Reflections from the Perspective of International Environmental Negotiations
and the Sustainable Development Goals26 – that a healthy environment is a shared goal of all humanity and cannot be set aside or sacrificed to the imperatives of inter-national trade. Solutions that work for both trade and sustainable development are the only ones acceptable in the long run. This all the more true in that environment is emerging as a clear consumer preference. Successful trade and successful com-mercial activity increasingly depend on demonstrating environmental responsibility.
There is also a growing consciousness on the part of the environmental community that their objectives must, where possible, be pursued in ways that do not restrict trade in an unwarranted way and that do not constitute overt or hidden forms of green protection. The challenges remain great, but there is a genuine acceptance that solutions must emerge from cooperative rather than adversarial approaches.
6.2 Trade in an SDG world
In light of what appears to be long-term stagnation in the WTO and the as-yet-un-acknowledged definitive failure of the Doha Round27 to reach even a modest conclu-sion, attention has turned from trade towards the wider challenge of implementing the SDGs, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda28 on Finance for Development, and the Paris climate agreement.29 The question must be asked as to what these agreements mean for trade rules and trade policy, and how trade might contribute to their im-plementation.
At one level, the SDGs keep out of the world of the WTO and respect its independ-ent jurisdiction. The SDG targets, in various places, urge the WTO to complete the Doha Round, to reach a conclusion on the fish subsidies question or to recall the promises of favourable trade treatment made to developing countries. The upshot, however, is to leave the WTO and the trade world to get on with its business largely outside the reporting and accountability structures set up to track SDG implemen-tation.
At another level, however, trade is solidly in the picture. The notions of ‘means of implementation’ included in the 2030 Agenda urge UN members to enable devel-oping countries to reach their goals and targets through trade and investment as well as through domestic resource mobilization. If that is to be a genuine pathway towards sustainable development, however, serious realignment of power will be
26 ‘Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’, UNGA Res. 70/1 of 25 Sep-tember 2015.
27 Officially, the Doha Round is still underway, simply because no specific decision has been made to aban-don it or to conclude an agreement that no longer matches the mandate set out in the negotiating agenda Indeed, the Sustainable Development Goals call on the WTO to conclude the Doha Round. However, very few observers of trade policy hold out much hope for significant positive conclusion.
28 Addis Ababa Action Agenda of the Third International Conference on Financing for Development (2015), available at <https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/2051AAAA_Outcome.
pdf> (visited 22 May 2018).
29 Paris Agreement to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Paris, 12 December 2015, in force 4 November 2016; ‘Adoption of the Paris Agreement’, UNFCCC Dec. 1/CP.21 (2015).
11 Mark Halle needed in the trading system. At present, there is no movement whatsoever in that direction, leaving the present trade rules an inadequate tool to correct the imbalanc-es between developed and developing countriimbalanc-es. It is hard to imagine a change that would lead to the WTO acting in the spirit of the 2030 Agenda in respect of trade.
6.3 Final considerations
The account offered above is largely a positive one. From a highly adversarial start, the worlds of trade and environmental policy have moved along a convergent path.
Major issues that divided or appeared to divide the two have been resolved one way or another, even if through the ‘judicial activism’ of which the WTO Appellate Body is often accused. Can we therefore lower our vigilance and turn to other priorities?
Unfortunately, not. For all the prosperity and stability that the multilateral trading system has permitted, the fact remains that the rules embodied in the WTO reflect the needs of a global economy that, increasingly, appears incompatible with sustain-able development. If trade is genuinely to be the means to the end goal of delivering on sustainability, then we must question the extent to which that is possible under a trade regime that serves an unsustainable form of economic organization.
Nor can we be sanguine about the extent to which the SDGs appear to exempt the WTO and the wider trade regime from shouldering their share of the burden in en-suring that the SDGs are reached. The effective exemption from which they appear benefit allows trade and sustainable development to remain apart at a time when there can only be one agenda – the one that takes us to the goal set out in the 2030 Agenda and that the trading system ostensibly serves.
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