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

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.