Trade-Environmental linkage in multilateral environmental agreements: implications for sustainable development in developing countries

Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) provide the regulatory framework of principles and policies for the protection of the global environment and for addressing global environmental problems. Together, the MEAs form an international environmental regime made up from a number of agreements designed to strengthen international cooperation to address environmental problems. MEAs prescribe different types of trade measures. Some of them take the form of outright bans/prohibitions, quotas and certificate arrangements that include import and/or export permits and prior informed consent procedures and mandatory labeling schemes. Such trade measures have at times been considered negative, coercive and even punitive, yet they may be applied between parties to an MEA, and/or between parties against non-parties. As the environment and economy are interlinked, the environmental protection measures set out in MEAs will inevitably overlap with world free trade rules. They often have the same parties and address the same issues from different perspectives. This overlapping results in MEA-WTO linkages. Such linkages have the potential to impact the scope and amount of global free trade. This paper will examine the interaction of trade and the environment in three MEAs, and argue that these interactions leave developing worse off than developed countries.