{"id":1255,"date":"2020-02-28T11:07:10","date_gmt":"2020-02-28T10:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ietp.thenoklu-studio.com\/?p=1255"},"modified":"2020-02-28T11:18:14","modified_gmt":"2020-02-28T10:18:14","slug":"for-an-environmentally-friendly-trade-policy-in-mauritius","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/entreprenanteafrique.thenoklu-studio.com\/en\/for-an-environmentally-friendly-trade-policy-in-mauritius\/","title":{"rendered":"For an environmentally friendly trade policy in Mauritius."},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is a plea for Mauritius to join the ACCTS negotiations.
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At the annual United Nations meeting in New York (September 2019), the New Zealand Minister of Trade announced that five countries, Costa Rica, Iceland, Fiji, New Zealand, and Norway would start negotiations for an Agreement on Climate Change, Trade and Sustainability (ACCTS<\/a>). This post is a plea for Mauritius to join the ACCTS negotiations.<\/p>\n

Mauritius is among the first signatories to the 1992 Rio Convention on Biological Diversity and the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015.<\/strong> Proof of its concern to protect its environment, Mauritius has just hosted no less than four conferences on the environment. Mauritius’ insularity increases the pressure of the effects of human activities on the sustainability of its ecosystem. Of course, Mauritius’ economic success owes much to its policy of openness to foreign trade. However, trade policies and environmental policies have evolved independently, although a link between the two, recognized in Daniel Esty’s seminal book “Greening the GATT”, published in 1995.<\/p>\n

The WTO Doha negotiations, launched in November 2001, called for trade policies that would protect the environment by reducing barriers to trade in ‘environmental goods and services’. According to the OECD definition, the environmental goods and services industry consists of “activities which produce goods and services to measure, prevent, limit, minimise or correct environmental damage to water, air and soil, as well as problems related to waste, noise and eco-systems.”<\/p>\n

A successful negotiation would have given developing countries access to goods and services that reduce environmental damage, while these developing countries would gain access to the markets of high-income countries for goods whose characteristics (production and consumption) are less environmentally damaging (for example, wooden rather than plastic cutlery). Neither Doha nor the negotiations conducted by a group of 15 countries in 2015 were successful, as countries refused to accept a list of goods with a high level of protection.\u00a0\u00a0 The objectives of the ACCTS agreement are :<\/p>\n

The objectives of the ACCTS agreement are :<\/p>\n