ABSTRACT

As is clear from the discussion in Chapter 7, many of the critical trade and sustainable development issues and linkages actually have to do with commodity trade. The development dimension has been discussed in other chapters. This chapter starts by assessing how the current rules of the international trading system either do or do not take environmental issues into account. It then analyses the wide range of initiatives outside the formal trading system that have sought to make commodity production and trade more clearly aligned with the whole range of sustainable development objectives. From this analysis it identifies the major features of an institutional regime that really could ensure that the expansion of commodity production contributed to sustainable development, and therefore was able to address the sustainability impacts of trade liberalization, as identified in Sustainability Impact Assessments (SIAs), and help resolve the problems they raise in trade negotiations.