Environmental goods negotiations

Paragraph 31 (iii) of the Doha Ministerial Declaration (DMD), provides a mandate, inter alia, to negotiate on “the reduction or, as appropriate, elimination of tariff and non-tariff barriers to environmental goods and services.” This call for trade liberalization in the DMD, however, is also guided, under Paragraph 6, by the principle that the protection of the environment and the promotion of sus [...] In case of the goods included in APEC list, for example, the developed countries make up 79 per cent of environmental goods exports, the developing countries about 20 per cent and the least developed countries less than one per cent (Bora and Teh, 2004). [...] It suggests that a combination of Special and Differential Treatment (SDT) provisions and bringing environmentally preferable products of export interest to developing countries in the ambit of environmental goods, could offer a balanced deal to the developing countries. [...] A realistic assessment of the outcome of negotiations thus seems that: a) The exercise of identification of goods should result in bringing certain goods of developing-country export interest under the ambit of environmental goods to reflect a balance in trade gains from the liberalization process; b) The principle of SDT for developing and least developed countries is taken into account. [...] On the other hand, while there seems to be broad support for certain categories of EPPs to be included in the EGS negotiations, the majority of WTO Members have argued against the use of criteria based on non-product-related production and process methods (npr-PPMs) to select products for the negotiations.