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3.The Fair Trade Principle
In order to originate and defend a “fair play” environment for international trade, the WTO law underlines that members should not carry out such trade strategy as subsidies, and exporters should not dump their products in other countries. The principle generally accepted in other trade fields comes up against difficulties in environment-related trade field. Given a member implements lax environmental standards, and most of enterprises are unable to bear the huge costs for controlling environmental pollution. In order to protect domestic environment, this member decides to provide enterprises and their products with environmental subsidies, consequently the environmental costs that should be undertaken by enterprises are now undertaken by consumers. Whether do this measure violate fair trade principle or not? The definition of “subsidy” in the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures regards positive actions of government as one of essential conditions of a “subsidy”, but in essence developing and implementing lower environmental standards are “negative subsidies” with which government provides enterprises and products. Clearly, the negative actions of government cannot be included in subsidies list definite by existing rules. On the other hand, products with environmental subsidies may export in large scale at quite low price because their costs don’t include environmental costs. Is it a kind of export “Eco-dumping” or not? At this time, once importing countries conclude that exporting countries provided environmental subsidies and exported products constituted “Eco-dumping”, they are like to levy anti-subsidy duty and anti-dumping duty in order to defend their own interests. However, their actions will violate the WTO law because it prohibits members to levy anti-subsidy duty and anti-dumping duty just because environmental regulation of exporting countries is lax. Obviously, the existing rules of the WTO can’t solve this difficulty.
4.The Preferential Treatment Principle
The WTO law enlarges the scope of application of the preferential treatment after the Uruguay Round Negotiation, and allows developing members to bear non-reciprocal obligations in the fields of trade in goods, trade in services and TRIPs and to enjoy preferential and non-reciprocal treatment. It is doubt that if this principle will naturally apply to the field of environment-related trade, because the integrity of eco-system of earth and the globosity of environmental problems decide that each country, regardless of big or small, rich or poor, has the common responsibility for protecting global environment, and that developing countries should not shirk their responsibilities and duties just because of their backward economy. If only a few developed countries who are in the lead in economy, technology, and environmental awareness undertake all the responsibilities for protecting global environment, there will be two abnormal results: these countries will give up because of want of driving mechanism; and developing countries will get “free track”. If developing countries continue to implement lower and lax environmental regulations or standards, it amounts to accommodate them to produce those products with low-technology content but heavy pollution, and it amounts to tolerate them to export primary goods based on pillage of natural resources. From a long-term perspective, it must intensify the degradation of global environment. Nevertheless, preferential treatment principle is not only a legacy of the GATT, but also a mirror of the “common but differentiated responsibility” principle set forth in Rio Declaration and many other documents of international environmental law in the field of multilateral liberal trade. If developed countries excessively emphasize the common responsibilities of developing countries, they must be objected strongly by the later. After all, “common” is not “equal”, meanwhile “differentiated” is close to “more favorable” even equal to “preferential”. As to this issue, the WTO becomes flexible. For example, the Agreement on TBT encourages Members to accept international standards to adjust to domestic standards equitably. It is justified by the fact that the WTO advocates positively developing countries to apply ISO14000---an international standard of environmental management system enacted by International Organization of Standardization whose major members are developed countries.
5.The Transparency Principle
The transparency principle of the WTO law fulfils an important role in ensuring the proper functioning of the multilateral trading system, in helping to prevent unnecessary trade restriction and distortion from occurring, in providing information about market opportunities and in helping to avoid trade disputes from arising. It can also provide a valuable first step in ensuring that trade and environment policies are developed and implemented in a mutually supportive way.However, many countries, in the name of environmental protection, apply “green trade barriers” and require imported products to meet demands of environmental technical standards and of laws, regulations and requirements concerning sanitary and phytosanitary measures but without informing exporters concrete condition in advance, which essentially set up barriers to foreign products’ accession to domestic market. For instance, one of causes of Mexico-United States Restriction on Imports of Tuna of 1988 is that maximum incident taking of dolphins of each year United States unilaterally set out for foreign vessels is lack of transparency so that tuna and its products from Mexico are unable to access to domestic market of United States.
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