Proposal
An important achievement of safe trade advocacy is the Biosafety Protocol agreed in Montreal in January 2000. Although it relied on the weaker legal principle of Informed Consent and not the much stronger Precautionary Principle language sought by advocates, the protocol was considered by most to be a victory that could enhance both biosafety and biosecurity.
Other safe trade reforms seek to advance sustainability by reducing reliance on energy subsidies and oil-based transport, and (indirectly) improves equity in economic affairs - that is, it promotes a safer political economy which is more respectful of life in general.
Safe trade is a major goal of systems of Bioregional democracy and is often advocated alongside it, e.g. by Greens. Both are also implicitly related to Community-Based Economics, as local trade in local goods with no reliance on alien organisms presents no ecological risk to its genomes, soil, or drainage basins. Accordingly, some advocates argue, local trade in any native species within an ecoregion's borders should not be taxed at all, as it presents little or no ecological risk compared to imported goods, and so requires little or no regulation, labelling, inspection, or other expenses.
The assumption that imports carry moral hazards, and that tax, trade, tariff measures should compensate for harms done, is shared by advocates of fair trade whose programs address, in addition, more overt social justice concerns of human beings, such as the maintenance of the "human capital" of a region. Both initiatives are alternatives to free trade, which has no such controls, and generally permits and encourages free transit in goods (but not, in general, labour) across ecological and social borders.
A broader understanding of biosecurity that is emerging under threat of biological warfare, and the fear that such economically devastating events as the mad cow disease epidemic could recur, either deliberately (as an act of bioterrorism) or by accident due to unrestricted imports, is causing some nations, notably New Zealand, to adopt relatively harsh restrictions against imported organisms. As one objective of asymmetric warfare is to cause attacks to appear initially as accidents, or blame slow responses on apparently incompetent governments, there is some concern that spreading a virulent organism among animals would be an effective way to attack humans, damage economies, and discredit governments who are lax on biosecurity. Technologies for scanning for dangerous organisms at ports and markets are also becoming more reliable and less expensive. However, no bio-defense solution seems to be able to compete with a simple reduction of import volumes, and its corresponding reduction in risk of any accidents.
Read more about this topic: Safe Trade