This report identifies options that negotiators and policy-makers could pursue in order to reach a permanent solution at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to the problems some developing countries say they face when buying food at government-set (or government-administered) prices under their public stockholding programs for food security purposes. The …
oil exploration Argentine veterans cry war As diplomatic tensions between the UK and Argentina escalate following oil drilling plan near the Falklands, Argentine war veterans have threatened to invade the South Atlantic archipelago controlled by the UK. A war vets’ association in Bruenos Aires demonstrated in front of the British …
Defusing a long-running trade dispute over American cotton subsidies, the United States and Brazil agreed to begin negotiating a compromise deal that could prevent the implementation of Brazilian trade sanctions on a wide range of US goods and intellectual property. Brazil agreed to hold off on retaliation as a result …
Plans To Take On West Once Trade Barriers Are Set Up POLICYMAKERS and businesses are bracing to face the threat of higher entry barriers for Indian goods in the Western markets under the garb of environmental protection. Both the US and the EU are discussing additional taxes on carbon-emitting products …
If a carbon tax is to be devised at all, it should wait for the current confabulations at the multilateral level to lay down acceptable ground rules. The Minister of State for Environment and Forests, Mr Jairam Ramesh, has done well to counter the threat from the US and Europe …
Vidya Ram A border carbon tax at the region's border should only be considered after other options have been looked at, a key EU official has said. Though the tariffs remained
The EU-India agreement might not stop generic drug seizures at European portsJust a few months ago, Indian officials were up in arms against the European Union (EU) after several generic drug consignments en route to Latin America and Africa had been seized by EU customs. Subsequently, commerce ministry officials vowed …
Upping the ante in a long-running trade spat with the United States, Brazil announced that it intends to break US patents and intellectual property rights in retaliation against Washington
MUCH has been written about the recent Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change that will continue to reverberate. Copenhagen was not supposed to be the be all and end all on environmental matters. It was part of a process and, even if it disappointed many, it remains a significant secondbest milestone, …
The Global Subsidies Initiative (GSI) recommends a three-step process to define, measure and evaluate subsidies; this process starts with a broad, crosssectoral application that narrows throughout the process. The benefits of this approach are that it is flexible enough to cover different national priorities and varying subsidy profiles, it is …
Most discussions about using international institutions to address climate change focus narrowly on the work of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. However, many other international institutions also have a significant role to play in mitigating and adapting to the effects of climate change. This paper examines the …
Will the global climate regime resemble the trade regime? If so, what would such a development imply for the governance of climate change? Both before and certainly in the aftermath of the Copenhagen climate conference, a debate has been underway on whether the architecture of the climate regime needs to …
Olivier De Schutter is the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food. He aims to inform people at the highest political levels about the role that smallholders play in the world
DEVELOPING countries, including India, Brazil, China and Mexico, have called for exclusion of small and marginal fishermen from the multilateral curbs on fisheries subsidies under the World Trade Organisation (WTO). In a recent representation to the committee on rules, these countries have suggested various flexibilities for fishworkers from developing countries …
The commerce ministry is taking a pre-emptive shot at proposed policies in the US and the European Union, aimed at using environmental standards as platforms for implementing trade barriers with the developing world. Speaking at the release of a report by India
International trade has become one of the pillars of the global economic system; an overlap between climate change policies and the multi-lateral trading system administered by the World Trade Organization (WTO) therefore seems inevitable. International trade affects climate change as it potentially increases economic activity that may in turn lead …
