At the request of the Government of Jordan, CBTF sent an advisory mission to assist the Jordanian authorities concerned in assessing their interests in the negotiations conducted under the mandate provided for in paragraph 31(iii) of the Doha Ministerial Declaration and, in the process, familiarize them with the problems relating to product coverage, negotiating modalities as well as with the implementation issues handled by customs authorities.

CBTF intends to commission a study on the relationship between EGs and EPPs as part of an overall attempt to help capture the connection between EPPs and the EGs being proposed in the CTESS. The study would attempt to bring the EPPs discussion into focus with the environmental goods list discussion, without marginalizing either.The CBTF is also focusing on multilateral environment agreements (MEAs), in particular how the negotiations on EGS can be framed to help implement MEAs and how MEAs’ objectives can be achieved through trade. The CBTF has commissioned a paper on Negotiations on Environmental Goods and Services and MEAs Implementation. The paper will describe opportunities linking EGs to technology transfer and enhancement of national-level MEA implementation.

Findings of the recent CBTF study on 'Environmental Goods: Identifying Items of Export Interest to Developing Countries' were presented at the briefing. The paper identifies two types of EGs, 'Type A' which includes industrial goods used to provide environmental services to address pollution and waste affecting water, soil and air; and 'Type B' which are classified as EPPs and have environmentally preferable characteristics relative to substitute goods, i.e., are less detrimental to the environment during at least one stage of their lifecycle. The study concludes that developing countries have an important export surplus with developed countries in a number of groups of EGs, in particular EPPs, including manufactured apparel from natural cotton fibres, apparel manufactured from natural wool and silk fibre, wood and wood-based products, clean fuels and renewable energy, other Type A EGs, and the core list of EPPs. These groups of EGs account for 8 per cent of developing country exports, compared to only 2.8 per cent for those EGs on the OECD and APEC list.

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