Chapter IX of the ‘Report of the Consultative Board on The Future of the WTO’ concerns ‘The role of the WTO Director-General and Secretariat’. The report generally expresses concern that the WTO secretariat, although ‘highly skilled’ and ‘well-regarded’ has become ‘more timid’ and passive than in the past, and that the ‘mutual confidence’ between delegations and WTO staff has declined. The report finds that the Director-General has become more of a ‘spokesperson and marketing executive’ for the organization than a leader who represents a driving, proactive force in the shaping and brokering of trade negotiations, as compared with the past where Directors-Generals ‘were sometimes regarded virtually as spiritual leaders of the system’. It warns that the costs of such a trend will be ‘lost efficiency’ and a loss of intellectual leadership.

A perception of institutional crisis is pervading international organizations. One evermore fashionable response by the administration of an affected organization is to entrust a group of eminent persons to consider its future. Perhaps not surprisingly the resulting report calls for a politically feasible strengthening of that organization for which it provides good grounds. The most important recent example is the United Nations report entitled ‘A more secure world: our shared responsibility’. A similar approach has been taken by WTO Director-General Supachai Panitchpakdi who called Peter Sutherland, Jagdish Bhagwati, Kwesi Botchwey, Niall FitzGerald, Koichi Hamada, John H. Jackson, Celso Lafer and Thierry de Montbrial on to a Consultative Board, the task of which was to think about the ‘Future of the WTO’ by ‘Addressing institutional challenges in the new millennium’. The group selected is particularly close to the current institution; it includes no scholar, intellectual, or politician who has voiced substantial and serious criticism.

As usual the authors have divided their labor, based on expertise. In particular, the economic analysis in section 4 was the responsibility of Damien Neven; Robert Howse’s own understanding of the costs and benefits of international trade law rules with respect to intellectual property protection in general depends on a rather different framework for analysing the problem. However, in so far as the legal and economic analysis of the Havana Club case itself is concerned, which deals only with trademarks as a form of IP protection, the authors are in agreement.

In August 2001, the United States Department of Commerce (USDOC) issued a preliminary determination that Canadian schemes for allocating standing timber to private harvesters – “stumpage” programs – provided countervailable subsidies to Canadian softwood lumber producers. It also preliminarily determined that critical circumstances existed in the US softwood lumber industry, caused by Canadian imports. Provisional measures were imposed on the basis of a preliminary subsidy rate of 19.31 percent, applicable to all producers/exporters, and applied to all entries of softwood lumber from Canada.

Arguments against free trade are often couched in ethical terms. They usually describe the plight of those who lose from free trade, but seldom consider the costs of protectionism. This essay examines free trade from the perspective of several important ethical theories and concludes that free trade is consistent with each of them.

New food regulations may impede international trade, but multilateral mechanisms can resolve trade conflicts when they do arise. Food safety regulation in industrialized countries during the 1990s increasingly uses risk analysis in a farm-to-table approach, promotes the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) system, and increases the stringency of standards or creates new regulations for hazards. The 1995 Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement), negotiated by World Trade Organization (WTO) members, establishes a framework to reduce their trade distorting aspects. Three of the principles under the SPS Agreement – science-based risk assessment, equivalence, and harmonization – directly address aspects of food safety regulation that create the potential for trade disputes. In many cases, the science requirements of the Agreement have led to the elimination of unnecessary regulatory barriers to trade. However, some high profile cases remain unresolved because of gaps in convergence around risk management principles that were not spelled out in the Agreement in deference to national sovereignty. The evidence also indicates that there has been limited progress in reducing regulatory transactions costs to trade in food through equivalence or harmonization.

The facts of EC – Sardines are simple enough. A European Communities (EC) regulation stipulated that the designation Sardines could be used on preserved fish only for the genus Sardina pilchardus. The broad rationale claimed for this measure was to prevent consumer confusion. Allegedly European consumers associated the appellation “Sardines” with the pilchardus genus. Subsequently the Codex Alimentarius Commission set an international standard which effectively would allow other types of fish e.g. the genus Sardinops sagax, to use the word Sardine as part of its packaging designation. Peru, which exports Sardinops to Europe could not, under the Community regulation, use the designation Sardines in any shape or manner even though this prohibition would be contrary to the international standard set by the Codex Commission.

This rubric is intended for occasional contributions from on-the-ground practitioners in Geneva and national capitals. Our hope is that this category will inspire other practitioners to submit notes and articles – typically in the range of 2,000 to 10,000 words – to the World Trade Review. As with all notes and articles submitted to the World Trade Review, manuscripts in this category will be reviewed by independent referees. However, the focus is intended to be practice oriented and at least one of the two referees will be a fellow practitioner.

On 16 January 2003, the WTO Appellate Body (AB) issues its report on the appeal of the Panel decision in United States-Continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act of 2000). The report concerns the consistency of the US Continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act of 2000 (the ‘CDSOA’, or the so-called Byrd Amendment) with several WTO provisions. A host of complainants (Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, the European Community, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Mexico, and Thailand) as well as four third parties evidence the interest in the dispute among WTO Members. The appeal was directed against the Panel's finding that the legislation was inconsistent with the US obligations under the WTO Agreements on Antidumping (AD) and Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM).