Environmental Standards Trade Agreements:
Challenges for Developing Countries

RIS has initiated a major work programme on various dimensions of standards especially in context of global value chains. This would largely look into the broad debate on SPS/TBT in agriculture as well as in manufacturing and other sectors. The idea is to develop analytical framework for looking into the wider implications of standards on production, process and international trade specifically with perspective of developing countries. As part of this programme two major initiatives have been taken. One was the study of environmental issues in FTAs across Asia. At the various multilateral fora, including WTO, consideration of environmental issues in international trade, is no more a matter of choice and the linkage is widely being recognized at the normative level as well. There are several economic studies, which acknowledge the possibility of adverse impact of trade liberalization on environment. However, the emergence of the Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and the various other variants of preferential trade agreements, in Asia, pose several challenges for environment management. The problem is that the FTAs are being perceived as quicker mechanism for bypassing the complicated multilateral negotiations. The US-Singapore FTA poses several challenges in this regard. This paper attempted to look into some of these issues. This paper has been issued as a RIS Discussion Paper # 67.

The other initiative as part of this work programme was to launch a network of research institutes and think tanks on standard related issues. This network is being called as Standards and Rules of Trade (START). RIS along with Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), Copenhagen, Denmark and Institute of Development Studies (IDS), UK are the founder members of the network.

Research Team: Dr. Sachin Chaturvedi et al.