|
TRADE by Mark Ritchie |
Three important, but significantly different, subjects get thrown together in discussions about trade. The first is the physical act of importing and exporting goods and services. The second subject consists of the various international trade agreements that are in force, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), formerly the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). And the third subject that comes under the name of trade consists of negotiations for new trade agreements, including proposals to expand the NAFTA to all Latin America and to expand the Asia-Pacific Economic Council (APEC) into a pan-Pacific free trade zone. The following Websites cover different aspects of these three interrelated subjects.
From the "Mother of all Trade Agreements", this site is relatively new but rich in the necessary details about the content of agreements, disagreements, disputes and the their settlements, and trade-related data of various kinds. There is a special Committee on Trade and Environment.
2. United States Trade Representative
Chief U.S. government agency charged with trade policymaking and negotiations. There is no specific section on trade and environment, but it's a topic that is covered in a number of speeches, reports, testimonies, etc.
3. North American Free Trade Agreement text is available in a lot of places, but is officially kept by the Massachusetts Institute for Technology. Note that since environmental issues were kept out of this agreement, there is not any section that deals with these issues except indirectly. For information on NAFTA's environmental "sidedeal" check out Commission on Environmental Cooperation. It includes an excellent database on environmental law plus links to all of the related commissions.
4. In the NGO world there are two primary Websites that cover trade and environment issues broadly. The oldest and largest is maintained by Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP). It includes a half-dozen different newsletters covering trade and environment issues, including their daily newsletter published during the Uruguay Round negotiations of the World Trade Organization. It can be reached via the IATP homepage at www.iatp.org/iatp. You can use IATP's special "bulletin maker" tool to create your own newsletter or reserach report on any specific environment issue drawing upon IATP's extensive archives.
5. The second of the NGO sites, and perhaps the most beautiful and multi-lingual of all the trade sites, is from the International Institute for Sustainable Development. Excellent on both trade and sustainability.
Also see: For the best general coverage of trade, check out the fantastic site at Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch: Friends of the Earth's Trade, Environment and Sustainability Programme.
Mark Ritchie is the President of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, in Minneapolis.