5. WTO Dispute Settlement & Sustainable Development: Solving the Crisis
It is important to understand that these three trade disputes represent only the tip of the social and environmental iceberg that the WTO is about to strike. Other recent rulings like that on the US-India TRIPs/patent letter box dispute raise equity and development questions. Potential future WTO disputes on labelling or trade restrictions on trade in genetically modified organisms (GMOs), on furs from animals caught in leg-hold traps, or on national balance of payments regimes are set to bring the WTO into conflict with other nationally and democratically determined social and environmental policies.
While the recommendations laid out in the specific cases above will go some way to defusing these conflicts, a more fundamental approach is needed to align the WTO with sustainable development objectives. Some combination of WTO rule changes and sharing of jurisdiction with other intergovernmental bodies with relevant policy mandates will be central to this broader approach. There should be a role for UNEP, UNCTAD and WHO on environment, development and health-related trade disputes, respectively. Where WTO rules conflict in any sense with multilateral environmental agreements, the WTO must collaborate with and share or yield its jurisdiction to those agreements.
Ultimately, the best solution may be to create a new, less partisan body to ajudicate on international trade disputes with social and environmental ramifications. This institution would have to incorporate the necessary multi-disciplinary expertise and be more transparent than the WTO and its dispute settlement process. It should incude legal specialists with varied backgrounds (including trade, environment and development), supported by a sophisticated independent expert process. Such a dispute settlement process should also engage the relevant intergovernmental agencies (eg UNEP, MEA Secretariats, UNCTAD and UNDP) and provide direct participation for all the relevant civil society stakeholders in the dispute. It would both fill the gaps between the existing intergovernmental bodies and, where necessary, in some sense overarch those bodies. No clear picture of such an institution can be formed at present, but that is ultimately where the current crisis in the WTO dispute settlement process may lead us.

