The Case for a Positive Southern Agenda on Trade and Environment

Abstract

“If you don’t know where you are going,” according to a famous expression, “any road will take you there.” No collectively defined policy and regulatory system can function optimally unless it has a clear and shared vision of that for which it is intended. One of the frustrations of trying to make the multilateral trading system compatible with widely held and generally agreed societal aspirations, such as environmental sustainability, is that nobody clearly understands what goal the multilateral trading system is trying to attain. Worse still, no commonly shared sense of the system’s ultimate goal is apparent among its constituent members.