ent”18. The report was widely perceived to be an effort by the WTO Secretariat to put international trade in a more favourable light, so-called “Olive branch”19. But the report asserts without proof that the gains from trade are sufficient to repair any environmental damage, which made many environmentalists unhappy20.Part Three: Solutions to reconcile the environment and trade.

As the existing WTO dispute settlement system could not deal with the conflict well in the view from environmental protection, there have a lot of potential solutions been recommended.

1. Exemption of multilateral environmental agreements in GATT through waiver.

The WTO agreement explicitly allows parties to waive GATT obligations in exceptional circumstances. So it is worth considering to exempt multilateral environmental agreements from GATT rules. Of course, such waiver should be approved by a three-fourths majority of GATT parties. It is not impossible in some circumstances.

Although someone argues that this approach appears to rank the GATT/WTO and trade liberalization above multilateral environmental protection, it would prove to be useful in the interim.

2. Amending the GATT.

Because of the vague language used in Article XX of GATT and the narrow interpretation of these grounds by the Panel and the Appellate Body, it became very difficult for a country to use it as safeguard to protect environment. So there are suggestions to amend the GATT and give express provision to exempt environmental protection action, ie, a real “green exception”.

3. Procedural changes to dispute settlement under the GATT/WTO.

Assuming for a moment that GATT/WTO in the proper forum for adjudication of trade and environment disputes, there are ways to make future WTO tribunals more conducive to fair and informed decision-making. For example, the selection of panellists. The objective of panellists is to create a sufficiently diverse background and a wide spectrum of experience. So one can argue the WTO tribunals should include experts in the realm of environmental protection. The panel member should be recognized by both trade and environment concerns. Maybe things will be different in that case.

4. Change of forum, ie, change the dispute settlement forum from the WTO to other international body, for example, International Court of Justice(ICJ) it would be more neutral and more fair to both sides.

Other suggestions include setting up a new global environmental organisation equal to the WTO regime. Some environmentalist even suggest that “in order to force a more environmental friendly interpretation of Article XX, one of the member countries, particularly the United States or the European Union, may have to start ignoring the WTO’s decisions.21” However, we think it is not a positive attitude to solve the problem and the above-said suggestions are either infeasible in some aspects or difficult to achieve. In our view, the eco-labelling scheme is comparatively practicable solution. So next we would like to introduce it. It is impossible for us to introduce all details of the eco-label, so we only discuss some main points:

Eco-label is also referred to as green-label which means putting labels on products to inform consumers of their environmentally-friendly character. It comes into being accompanied with the political awakening and rising level of public concern with the environment protection. In 1971 the Germany government put first forward the concept of Eco-label for consumer products22, and in 1978 the first Eco-label program in the world was launched in Germany23. Now there are over 20 countries, especial industrilized countries, including Canada, Japan, Norway, Austria, France, Singapore, etc, have adopted the Eco-label program in many different forms at local, national, regional and international level.

Under all programs currently existing or proposed there are committees with broad representation—with members from the government department concerned, as we

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