If you’re a millennial like me, odds are your refrigerator and recycling bin are currently jammed full of colorful cans and bottles of sparkling water. But an ongoing trade dispute about beef could directly affecting the choice of sparkling water available on your grocery store shelves.
A whopping 20 percent of the nearly 400 million pounds of cranberries we consume per year are eaten during Thanksgiving week alone. It’s a logical growth strategy to share our love of cranberries with global eaters year-round, but without a trade agreement with our largest markets, we could lose out to growers from other countries.
If the Trump administration seeks an end to binding dispute settlement procedures, it would represent a significant departure from decades of the United States leading the global charge for making dispute settlement in trade agreements binding and enforceable.
WTO members voluntarily agreed to rules to create a more secure and predictable trading environment for their traders. By and large, members comply with these rules so that others will as well. But when one member believes that another is not complying, the WTO has procedures for settling disputes.