Trade & Environment Database (TED)

The TED Cases Studies intend to provide a common categorical basis for looking at issues of trade and environment. Issues such as environment (especially), culture, human rights, labor rights and related topics are of keen interest in the case studies. Each set of case studies if organized by a key focal theme. Below are the cases in the TED, organized by when they were posted.

Click here to see the NEW Geographic Indications and International Trade (GIANT) project.

Featured TED Case Studies

The Neem Tree
Number 665, January 2002
by Sara Hasan

The United States and India are currently involved in a biopiracy dispute over the rights to a tree indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, the neem tree. While the neem tree has been used in India for over 2000 years for various purposes such as pesticides, spermicides and toothbrushes, a US company has been suing Indian companies for producing the emulsion because they have a patent on the process. The dispute is over the rights of companies to conduct research and development by using patents against the interest of the people who live at the source of the resource. To what extent can multinational companies claim and patent resources from the develping countries, like India? The movement around the issue of the neem tree and trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS) represents a challenge to the developing countries.

 

Neem

Parmigiano-Reggiano: The "King" of Cheeses
Number 677, 2003
by Elizabeth Jahncke

For many Americans, Parmesan cheese, as we know it, comes in a green, cylindrical can. Manufactured by large cheese companies, most American Parmesan cheese is mass-produced and sold in grocery stores everywhere at a competitive, but low price, ensuring that spaghetti and meatballs throughout the United States are garnished with its unmistakably unique flavor. However, for many Italians, Parmesan cheese is not mass-produced by large, Italian cheese companies. Ask an Italian how Parmesan cheese is made and they may answer, Non si fabrica, Si fa - It is not made, but rather, produced.

 

cheese