At Liberal International’s 204th Executive Committee Meeting, the membership adopted a new policy paper on fair trade. “The Future of Liberal Trade in the 21st Century” identifies the challenges that liberal trade is today facing and provides a set of concrete recommendations on how these should be addressed. The policy paper also identifies existing opportunities for developing fair and liberal trade.
The paper covers a range of different topics such as multilateralism, digitalisation, regional integration, women’s economic empowerment, human rights, and sustainability, discussing their relation to trade from a liberal angle. How should multilateralism in trade be renewed? Can trade be used as a tool to combat human rights violations? And how can trade be used to promote a green transition, rather than being seen as something accelerating climate change? The paper serves as a conversation starter for inter alia these topics, giving impetus to advance the debate.
At the heart of the paper lies the promotion of international cooperation and revival of multilateralism; states cannot individually address many of the challenges we face today. Transnational cooperation is necessary as we try to build a fair and sustainable world economy.
As the policy paper has now been adopted by the LI membership at the last Executive Committee, the next step will be its implementation. Cooperation with member parties will play a key role in ensuring this is successful. LI also strives to present the paper and its goals in different international forums and events next year, in an attempt to build new partnerships. Cooperation with the WTO will further be central for the promotion of certain goals in the paper, such as repairing the dispute settlement mechanism and the establishing of new negotiations formats within the WTO. As LI’s Fair Trade Working Group (FTWG) recently obtained observer status in the WTO Ministerial Conferences, the possibilities for cooperation around these goals were broadened.
The policy paper was drafted by Liberal International’s Fair Trade Working Group. Its content and goals will be presented closer over the coming weeks on our social media. If you are interested in learning more about the liberal perspective on how to develop trade in the 21st century, stay tuned!
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