Sustainability standards have emerged in the marketplace for food, textiles and a wide range of consumer goods and services, and their role continues to grow, particularly in emerging markets. This policy brief shows that sustainability standards provide new opportunities to participate in trade where they improve competitiveness of exporters.
The paper clarifies that sustainability standards provide consumers with information and assurance about the environmental impact of production and so help build value into certified goods and services. This has a key role to play in helping developing countries transition to a green economy. In addition, these standards are increasingly important in south-south trade, in light of growth of cross-border trade facilitated by regional economic communities.
On the other hand, many developing countries are concerned that these standards can be potential non-tariff barriers to trade. This problem is more acute for exporters in developing countries who have less capacity to carry out multiple conformity assessments for different markets.
The author concludes that more can be done to realise the full potential of the trade opportunities to be created by sustainability standards. Future initiatives in this field need to consider the following:
- harmonisation and equivalence of standards is required to reduce potential barriers to trade for developing countries
- sharing of best practices in the application and improvement of sustainability standards and auditing
- cost-sharing solutions need to be developed to take the financial burden off producers and to share compliance costs more evenly along supply chains
- greater participation by developing countries in standard-setting
- stronger integration of the sustainability agenda in south-south trade
This summary was prepared by Eldis