Current Agriculture, Food & Resource Issues
G.E. Isaac
Implications and Conclusions
This case study of the WTO-Cartagena Protocol relationship provides two general
insights into international policy coordination between trade agreements and MEAs.
First, they are likely to be in concert when (1) the MEA has a narrow scope and (2) there
exists a transatlantic consensus on the systemic regulatory principles required to deal with
the particular issue. Second, inversely, they are likely to be in conflict when the MEA has
a broad scope and when there exists transatlantic regulatory regionalism - precisely the
characteristics present in the WTO-Cartagena Protocol relationship. This international
policy conflict creates fragmented international markets, decreasing the economies of
scale; producers of GMOs, however, depend on economies of scale to recoup the
considerable research and development costs they incur.
Introduction
In a broad sense, international policy coordination has the objective of solving policy
(mis)alignment issues between sovereign nations through bilateral, plurilateral or
multilateral negotiations. For example, monetary policy coordination represents an
attempt to control the international spillover effects that foreign policies can have on
domestic inflation and employment (Persson and Tabellini, 2000). International trade
policy coordination represents an attempt to solve multinational market failures that
prevent the efficient allocation of resources; such failures arise when nations do not
engage in economic activities consistent with their comparative advantage (Gaisford and
Kerr, 2001). Similarly, international environmental policy coordination represents an
attempt to solve problems of environmental degradation that arise when nations acting in
their own best (economic) interest fail to act in the best interest of global biodiversity
(Helm, 2000; Killinger, 2000).
Despite the sensibleness of coordinating across policy domains to achieve global
gains, international policy coordination is rarely an easy undertaking. For instance,
multilateral efforts to liberalize international trade, such as the Uruguay Round and the
current Doha “Development” Agenda, often take much longer than initially expected and
often involve several significant crises that threaten the entire round. Even at a regional or
plurilateral level, policy coordination is difficult, as the European Union’s efforts to
establish the Single European Market demonstrate. The challenge for international policy
coordination is that the objective of maximizing global gains is sometimes not consistent
with that of maximizing domestic gains. A national government, elected by domestic -
not international - constituents, may simply lack the political will to engage in activities
that increase global welfare at the expense of domestic welfare. And if one nation faces
this dilemma, others do as well, creating a market failure of collective action (Olson,
1965).
Successful multilateral efforts in international policy coordination may result in the
creation of multilateral paradigms. For example, the creation of the World Trade
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