Taipei, Aug. 22 (CNA) Taiwan, like other World Trade Organization (WTO) members, should understand how to take advantage of appropriate regulations under the WTO framework in the event of trade disputes relating to environmental issues, a Japanese academic said in an international conference held in Taipei Wednesday.
There will always be trade disputes relating to food safety and environmental issues and there is limit to what the dispute settlement procedure can do, Mitsuo Matsushita, a law professor at Japan's Seikei University and a former member of the WTO's Appellate Body, said in the conference titled "Global Governance of Multilateral Environmental and Trading Systems."
There have been over 200 multilateral environmental agreements signed all over the world, including the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at protecting the environment. Some of them use a quota system, such as the International Convention for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna, while others are supposed to resolve the problems within a trading system, such as the Kyoto Protocol and the Basel Convention, Matsushita said.
However, disputes continue to happen, he went on, citing the latest dispute between Brazil and the European Commission over retreaded tires.
Potential conflicts between Kyoto Protocol, Cartagena Protocol (which regulates biosafety) and WTO rules are possible, which is why countries are encouraged to work out different ways to resolve the problems, Matsushita said.
"Global governance is needed to solve disputes such as terrorism and trade issues because we can't do it unilaterally, " Economic Vice Minister Hsieh Fadah said, adding that regional, transnational and international networks are needed to deal with environmental issues.
Any trade restriction implementation has to consider the factors of economical gains, social welfare and environmental impact, Hsieh noted.
The two-day conference was organized by the Chunghua Institution for Economic Research and invited scholars from Japan, South Korea, the U.S. and the WTO to participate.