Safe Trade.....

Safe trade is a slogan advocated by Greenpeace in its desire to "green" the World Trade Organization and the Doha Development Round. It is designed to compete with "free trade" as a concept.....

Safe trade is generally seen as a single framework of rules worldwide to drastically inhibit the flow of alien organisms (e.g. Genetically modified organisms, imported animals) across the borders of ecoregions, to preserve their natural wild biodiversity. It seeks to prevent ecological disasters caused by imported organisms or untested genetic technologies, and to augment and increase local natural capital by encouraging soil remediation, precision agriculture, and local consumption of the native species, rather than imported organisms and heavy use of pesticides.
 

Reception
 

Opposition

Critics of safe trade argue that the military and agriculture aspects of biosecurity are dissimilar, unlikely to converge in the form of an attack disguised as an accident, and require such differential prevention and response measures that there is little risk reduced in altering the fundamental structure of trade relationships to accommodate a robust regime of biosecurity. Such critics usually argue instead that emergency services' biodefense measures are sufficient to handle outbreaks of any diseases or alien organisms, and that such outbreaks are unlikely to be long sustained or deliberately masked as agricultural accidents. This, to the advocates, seems like wishful thinking.
 

Support

Advocates point to the costs of emergency measures such as burning over one million cows suspected of having foot-and-mouth disease in the UK, smoke from which they calculated (based on dioxin levels) was to be expected to kill several hundred Britons from cancers in this generation. Safe trade, they argue, would have removed the need for any such measures, as vaccination of British beef cattle would have been possible (the burning was to prevent British exports of beef from being rejected by its trade partners, who would not have been able to tell vaccinated from infected beef), and the foot-and-mouth disease was not so dangerous to humans that it could have justified dooming so many fellow citizens to die of the dioxin-caused cancers. The burning, they argue, was justified only by bad trade rules that spread infection and advise dangerous cures that are worse than the ailment itself.

Another argument supporting safe trade rules is that there are links between primate extinction and deforestation in the regions where primates are abundant, i.e. the Amazon rainforest, African rainforest, and Sumatran rainforest. Fail to prevent devastating logging in these regions, advocates claim, and a Great Ape species will likely become extinct, causing a critical link to the human past to be permanently lost. Accordingly, preventing logs from these forests from reaching foreign markets has been a major focus of Greenpeace actions, especially in 2002.