Conflicts And Coordination Between Free Trade And Environment Protection In WTO

The topic of trade and environment has been very popular with international conferences and forums. The relation between trade and environment appears as the conflicts of regulations, and that often occurs in the system of WTO, the organization with promoting free trade as its purpose. Trade disputes can be caused by environmental measures limiting international trade by some members or by terms that are not compliance with the principle of free trade provided in some Multi-Environment Agreements (MEAs). So it's imperative for WTO to solve the legal problems: How to explain the general exceptions of GATT1994 and other related agreements? How to deal with the relations among these agreements and MEAs? Besides, the legal conflicts of trade and environment also appear in the procedure of economic integration. The international competition promotes countries strengthen local economic co-ordination. They founded tariff alliance, free trade area and economic community to expand market and build up their strength in global trade. But free trade still has to face trade barrier or problems caused by differences of environment measures of countries. Some local economic communities designed regulations to balance the relation between trade and environment; these experiments are worth to be used for reference for WTO.Because environment barrier has legal base, it is adopted by developed countries. In front of these barriers, the exporting of China is inflicted grievous losses. Neither passive avoiding nor strong resisting is the right way to handle them. We should take part in the WTO negotiation actively and meanwhile, to protect our benefits by taking good use of the DSU, studying international rules and appealing to the DSB.