Integrating Environment and Trade

Abstract

John Jackson, with his prodigious knowledge and outstanding scholarship, was always intrigued by the intersection of international trade law with other areas of international law, whether environment, human rights, labor, or yet other areas. In fall 1999, we initiated a joint international law seminar on environment and trade, and coedited a book from the seminar, Reconciling Environment and Trade. John agreed to put the word environment before trade in the title for the seminar and for the book. John fervently believed in the power of dispute settlement and was intrigued with using it as a format for studying environment and trade issues. A growing number of cases before the World Trade Organization (WTO), and before the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) dispute settlement panels have dealt with environmental concerns in the context of international trade law. The disputes have primarily involved the GATT, the Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) Agreement and the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) Agreement. The seminar and the subsequent book focused on disputes involving public health, air pollution, food safety, endangered species, and environmental risks/biosafety. Together we authored the chapter, ‘The Framework for Environment and Trade Disputes’. John recognized that international trade law and other fields of law needed to be effectively reconciled so that legitimate measures were respected without compromising the integrity of international trade law and that measures taken under the rubric of other areas of law were not used as subterfuges for violations of international trade law. Both the 1992 Rio Conference on Environment and Development and the Preamble to the 1994 WTO Agreement recognize the goal of sustainable development, which provides an overarching framework for integrating both fields of law. The trade law distinction between product and process characteristics is important for sustainable development. From the environmental perspective, the process for producing a product is often more important than the product, e.g., harvesting shrimp by methods that kill turtles, and production processes that emit lots of carbon dioxide. The problem is not whether to adhere rigidly to the product–process