DTA

Perfezionamento

FERRARIS, LUCHINO

etd-09112019-132144

The Pursuit of Sustainable Agriculture in EU Free Trade Agreements

IUS/03

SCIENZE POLITICHE - PHD in Human Rights and Global Politics: Legal, Philosophical, and Economic Challenges

Membro ALABRESE, MARIAGRAZIA
Presidente Prof. DI BENEDETTO, SAVERIO
Membro Prof. FARAH, PAOLO

• environmental integration
• environmental protection
• free trade agreements
• sustainable agriculture
• sustainable development
• WTO law

16/03/2020;

completa

Further to the stalemate in multilateral trade negotiations, the last couple of decades have seen a great deal of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) proliferate all over the world. The EU has quickly adapted to this trend and nowadays has concluded (or is in the course of negotiating) bilateral trade agreements with virtually all potential third country parties. These agreements present a number of opportunities and challenges for the EU. Amongst the latter, there is the issue of ensuring that the EU succeeds in promoting its political and legal flagships in the outside world. This is particularly true for EU environmental integration in the agricultural sector, in so far as the EU can arguably boast of the highest standards in terms of sustainable development. If, on the one hand, the fact that the EU is bound by its own Treaties to promote its main values (including those relating to environmental protection) is uncontested, what is less clear, on the other hand, is the extent to which this should happen. Against this background, the fundamental research question of this work concerns the extent to which the EU pursues sustainable agriculture in third countries by means of its FTAs. While an argument is made in favour of the duty for the EU to pursue environmental protection with equal intensity in internal and external action, the hypothesis brought forward by this work is that the attention towards the environmental dimension of FTAs is on the rise and that the EU FTAs concluded after the 2006 Commission Communication ‘Global Europe: Competing in the world’ undoubtedly contribute enormously towards this aim. However, these efforts seem insufficient to reverse the negative impacts such agreements may have on the environment.
This dissertation is structured in three Parts. Part A sets the scene, identifying the notions of sustainable development and sustainable agriculture and depicting the state of play of their integration in EU law; Part B identifies the notion of EU FTAs in the context of EU trade policy and focuses on the key aspects to assess in each agreement the pursuit of sustainable agriculture in third countries, namely the Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) chapter, the effects produced by regulatory cooperation and the enforcement mechanisms; Part C selects three case studies of agreements concluded between the EU and developed country parties (the relationships between the EU and, respectively, Canada, South Korea and Ukraine) and three case studies of agreements concluded between the EU and developing country parties (the relationships between the EU and, respectively, Chile, the Southern African Development Community – SADC – and Vietnam).

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