The challenges we face are considerable: from rethinking our relationship with the environment, and the wide-reaching implications this has, to tackling the persistent inequalities and injustices that characterise our relationships with each other. The WFC has identified 24 key issues that it will seek to address. With each campaign the WFC will highlight the connections between these areas, and aim to integrate them into its policy recommendations.The global challenges can be roughly grouped into three categories:
Global Challenges
Environment
The key global challenges grouped together in this category concern our relationship with the planet that supports us. With limited natural resources, an increasingly urbanised and ever-growing population, and the looming threat of irreversible climate change, the need to reconsider the way we interact with our environment has never been more pressing. Paramount to this is the acknowledgement that we are a part of the global ecosystem and not its rulers.
Social Issues
The key global challenges grouped together in this category are concerned with ensuring that people across the world can lead healthy and fulfilled lives. This involves embracing the diversity of human traits and capabilities, and acknowledging that we are all equal and yet distinct.
Economics and Politics
The key global challenges grouped together in this category are concerned with the organisation of human societies and the relationships between them. This involves fair and peaceful exchange, and an equitable distribution of costs and benefits in the creation of global welfare.
Fair Trade
Humanity has always been involved in trade and exchange, and has greatly benefited from this. But trade can also be socially and environmentally destructive. Also, today 60% of world trade is estimated to be intra-company, i.e. based on tax considerations and not on Ricardo's mutual benefits. The key environmental and social externalities of trade need to be internalised to ensure full cost accounting of the impacts.
What is the optimum balance between self-reliance and global market integration? What are the pros and cons of fostering export dependency as the prime route of development? Could a new fair trade regime be implemented to provide a better deal for poor countries? How can the WTO's powers be balanced internally and externally to ensure that its trade promotion agenda does not harm more important goals?