World Trade Agreements Research Articles

Would State-Mandated Labels for Biotech Foods Violate World Trade Agreements

State laws mandating labels for foods produced with genetic engineering may be vulnerable to legal challenges under World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreements on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) and Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT). A ballot initiative currently under consideration in California imposing such labels is likely an SPS Measure, and arguably violates the trade agreement. The initiative raises novel issues under the TBT Agreement, and it is thus not clear whether a successful challenge could be brought under those measures. WTO Member States could take action against mandated biotech food label laws, as could the United States, but it is uncertain whether private parties could.

The Importance of Critical Literacy

Politics with a capital P is about government and world trade agreements and the United Nations peace-keeping forces; it is about ethnic or religious genocide and world tribunals; it is about apartheid and global capitalism, money laundering, and linguistic imperialism. It is about the inequities between the political North and the political South. It is about oil, the ozone layer, genetic engineering, and cloning. It is about the danger of global warming. It is about globalization, the new work order, and sweat shops in Asia.

Irrigation in the context of today's global food crisis

AbstractDuring 2008 the world witnessed a global food crisis which caused social unrest in many countries and drove 75 million more people into poverty. The crisis resulted from sharply higher oil prices, increased bio‐fuel production, dwindling grain stocks, market speculation, changing food consumption patterns in emerging economies, and changes in world trade agreements, among other factors. Although the rise in food prices was sudden, the fragility of global food security had been developing for years. During the 1960s and 1970s food production kept pace with demand as more cropland was irrigated and yields of irrigated crops increased dramatically. Irrigation played a critical role in combating hunger, poverty and death due to malnutrition. However, the environmental and social consequences of large irrigation schemes came into question, and investments in irrigation subsequently diminished. Today's food crisis is compounded by a rapidly growing world population, the conversion of food producing lands to bio‐fuel production, diminishing available freshwater supplies, competition for water by other sectors, climate change impacts, and the reduction in arable lands due to urbanization. It is critical that investments focus on increasing agricultural production through improved management of land and water resources, and the involvement of all stakeholders. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Biofuels and ecology

Biofuels and ecology

The asbestos case: a comment on the appointment and use of nonpartisan experts in world trade organization dispute resolution involving health risk.

The World Trade Organization is currently evolving its approach to incorporating scientific and technological evidence into its dispute-resolution process. In European Communities-Measures Affecting Asbestos and Asbestos-Containing Products, the Panel was faced with a large amount of complex and conflicting scientific evidence presented by the partisan experts. The Asbestos Panel's solution was to appoint independent, nonpartisan experts to help it understand and evaluate the scientific evidence. While this was far better than trying to unravel the conflicting scientific evidence on its own, two aspects of the Panel's adopted procedure merit scrutiny. First, the expert-selection process used by the Panel may not assure that the collective expertise of the appointed experts is broad enough when the dispute involves multidisciplinary scientific issues. Second, the process adopted by the Panel for consulting the appointed experts-which involved individual consultation rather than a consensus process-may leave a panel with a distorted or confused picture of the science. A consensus approach is the best means of obtaining scientific advice from appointed experts; it is most calculated to provide a clear and accurate report of the scientific information needed by a panel to make a fair and informed decision on the dispute before it. The underlying principle of world trade agreements is that it is beneficial to all of us to have free trade. Among other things, this requires an effective means of resolving disputes, and increasingly that includes disputes involving complex scientific and technological issues. This can be achieved only if the parties have confidence that their disputes will be decided in a fair and informed manner, based on the best science available. To achieve this goal, we suggest that future WTO panels depart in certain respects from the procedures utilized by the Asbestos Panel.

In the high court of South Africa, case no. 4138/98: the global politics of access to low-cost AIDS drugs in poor countries.

In 1998, 39 pharmaceutical manufacturers sued the government of South Africa to prevent the implementation of a law designed to facilitate access to AIDS drugs at low cost. The companies accused South Africa, the country with the largest population of individuals living with HIV/AIDS in the world, of circumventing patent protections guaranteed by the intellectual property rules that were included in the latest round of world trade agreements. The pharmaceutical companies dropped their lawsuit in the spring of 2001 after an avalanche of negative publicity. Yet, despite the government's victory, AIDS drugs remain very expensive in South Africa, and the government still refuses to provide antiretroviral therapy to adults. These events have shone a spotlight, not only on the possibilities for coordinated political activism in the era of instant global communications, but also on the tangled social, economic, and political dimensions of AIDS treatment in poor countries.

The New Politics of African Cinema at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs

French efforts in lobbying for a “cultural exception” in world trade agreements have attracted much attention. Less noticed have been the long-standing French attempts to support the film production of individuals from around the world, for whom making films in their countries of origin is difficult for economic, political, and social reasons. One of France’s areas of predilection for such cinematographic support has been francophone sub-Saharan Africa, specifically countries that were once former colonies. Shortly after most African countries in the region became independent, France created the Ministry of Cooperation and Development to administer relations with the African states; an important part of French support consisted of helping develop cinematographic production.

Le secteur des productions animales en Afrique subsaharienne des indépendances à 2020. III. Prospectives de la demande et de l'offre pour 2020 et voies de réponse au nécessaire développement de l'élevage

L'évolution des productions animales de 1964 à 1994 montre une diminution des protéines disponibles par habitant et par jour. Elle montre également une part faible de l'Afrique subsaharienne (Ass) dans le marché mondial des produits animaux. Les prospectives de 1994 à 2020 ont été faites en fonction d'un maintien du niveau de consommation actuelle, de la croissance démographique, du développement des villes et du niveau des revenus des ménages. Elles montrent que la consommation globale des viandes devrait croître de 3,9 p. 100 par an, celle des produits laitiers et des oeufs de 3,3 p. 100. L'offre, en fonction des ressources alimentaires disponibles pour l'alimentation des animaux, pourrait multiplier par 1,3 la production de viandes rouges, par 4,25 celle de viandes blanches, par 1,75 celle de lait et par 3,1 celle d'oeufs. Les consommations examinées par sous-régions indiquent plusieurs types de consommation et une grande diversité dans les quantités de protéines animales consommées par jour et par habitant allant de 4,2g en zone centrale à 13,8g dans la zone de l'Igad (Intergovernmental Authority on Drought). Les évolutions des consommations selon les produits montrent une forte augmentation des viandes blanches dans les régimes dans la plupart des zones. Ce bilan général de l'évolution de l'offre peut paraître pessimiste. Il ne doit pas occulter les efforts entrepris. En 30 ans, les productions de viande ont plus que doublé et les productions de produits laitiers ont été multipliées par 1,8. Pour prévoir la demande dans une génération, c'est-à-dire en 2020, trois facteurs qui influencent fortement sa croissance sont retenus: la démographie, l'urbanisation et l'élévation du niveau de vie. L'hypothèse selon laquelle la consommation individuelle de produits animaux en Afrique subsaharienne, où la sous-nutrition est déjà présente, ne peut continuer de baisser est également émise. Les facteurs d'évolution conditionnant l'offre sont passés en revue : ils portent sur les accords mondiaux sur le commerce et sur des facteurs propres à l'Ass (régionalisation...). Les conclusions développent l'obligation de l'intensification des productions animales qui passe par l'organisation des professionnels, la privatisation, les infrastructures.

Using an ecological understanding of farmland to reconcile nature conservation requirements, EU agriculture policy and world trade agreements

SUMMARYThe recent trend in the European Union for environmental objectives to be incorporated into agriculture policy is not simply because policy‐makers in Brussels have been convinced of the important biological value of farmland. Environmental payments to farmers have become a mechanism for supporting farmers whilst at the same time not generating increased production. There are two important reasons why production must be controlled: (i) because former production policies have been so successful, many sectors have over‐produced (for example, there are currently 700 000 tons of beef held in EU intervention stores) and this cannot continue; (ii) because the EU has agreed with its world trading partners (through GATT) virtually to remove production subsidies to farmers by the turn of the century. The danger, already apparent, is that environmental objectives will be misused to provide financial support to farms that are of intrinsically low biodiversity and nature conservation value. This will not be admissible under GATT and there is a danger that the misuse of environmental payments will cause major problems in the next round of GATT negotiations. There are therefore good political as well as ecological reasons for much better targeting of environmental support for farmland. Ecological studies that help us to understand the biological processes on farmland may therefore have to be used, not only for developing a more targeted environmental policy but also in the GATT negotiations.

EFFICIENT COTTON PRODUCTION IN GREECE WITH THE USE OF GOSSYM - A COTTON CROP SIMULATION MODEL

Cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) represents a dynamic crop production system for the agricultural economy of Greece. It is grown in approximately 400,000 ha in average the last few years and supports the income of more than 100,000 rural families. Its production management is based on excessive inputs of water, N fertilizer and agrochemicals, in most cases. This practice is expected to change in the near future due to reformed CAP, the new World trade agreements and serious environmental considerations. New production management strategies should be introduced to optimize yield throughout reduction of major production inputs. A valuable tool to optimise production is represented by GOSSYM, a cotton crop growth and yield simulation model. This model was established, validated and verified in the USA, where it is also used in commercial cotton production. A research study was undertaken in Greece and Spain to evaluate this model under the conditions met in the two cotton producing countries in EU. Results from evaluation in Greece have demonstrated the validity of GOSSYM as a tool for efficient cotton production with low input strategies.

Cultural Rights and World Trade Agreements in the Information Society

This article argues that the cultural problem of the Information Society can be defined in terms of conditions determining the production, distribution and access to expression. The conceptualization of culture and cultural rights is explored by organizing cultural debates into three models, with a critical common ground then identified in each regarding the significance of the concern for expression. This problematization then serves as a way of addressing a number of critical dimensions in the policy debates of the Information Society emerging in world trade agreements. It is held that cultural rights and the conditions of expression can be articulated as a product of forms of information policy, such as: intellectual property laws, universal service and access to critical features of networks in the production and distribution of expression; the number of information providers, producers and distributors favored by competition policies; and the structure of positive and negative information rights implemented as content regulation under constitutional, statutory and regulatory obligations. The article examines the treatment of this set of information policies in a few emerging world trade agreements for the information sector, and the analysis concludes that the current world trade paradigm of the Information Society stands to transform profoundly the structure of content in the information age in favor of concentration of expression under proprietary governance. The implications of this change and criteria for evaluating cultural rights and information rights are provided.

World trade agreements and nursing

There are plenty of challenges ahead as countries move to make freer and fairer trade agreements which cover services, such as nursing, as well as goods. But the work to get agreements right will bring its own reward.