International trade, valued at roughly six trillion dollars per year, could be a huge force for sustainable development. By opening up new markets, exposing domestic firms to international practices and bringing new investment and growth, trade can create the necessary conditions for poverty alleviation on a scale unreachable by dwindling traditional official development assistance. By spreading new, more efficient technologies trade can reduce the production of waste and help increase the efficiency with which we use resources.

But the outlook on trade and sustainable development today appears daunting, with a lack of substantive policy progress in many areas. The diversity of unresolved trade and sustainable development issues currently in multilateral, regional and bilateral negotiations, coupled with the challenge of implementing an equitable rules-based global trading system that works in concert with national, bi-lateral and regional policies and agreements presents enormous challenges for all countries.

There exists an ever greater urgency for developing and developed countries to develop the capacity and strategy to pursue sustainable development within the context of trade and investment policy and practice. This has highlighted the increasing need for objective and accurate research, analysis and capacity building, for policy makers both south and north, so they may have the information to enable policies which address social issues of poverty alleviation, increased access to health, education and income opportunities while ensuring environmental management that works in balance with economic and trade development.

Doing so depends on capacity at the national level to implement policies that help growth-producing domestic firms take advantage of opportunities. It also depends on the strength of the existing domestic regimes for environmental management, as trade-induced growth can have serious environmental and associated social impacts that, if unmitigated, inevitably affect the poorest, thereby rendering trade unsustainable.

Finally, it depends on the sharing of the benefits of trade, so that income inequalities are in fact lessened by economic growth. In a world of increasingly globalized economic activity, increasing environmental degradation and widening income inequality, achieving sustainable development will depend critically on understanding how these forces are linked at domestic and international levels.