Fiscal incentives and subsidies for the production of primary plastics help to exacerbate the plastic pollution crisis by artificially reducing the cost of plastics. While there are subsidies that directly go to the production of plastic precursors, many are indirect, going to fossil fuels. For the future plastics treaty to comprehensively address the entire life cycle of plastics, it must address subsidies.
To understand how subsidies may be addressed in the treaty, it is essential to craft a well-developed, balanced, and comprehensive policy framework, informed by existing disciplines and approaches in both trade law and international environmental agreements. Tackling Subsidies for Plastic Production: Key Considerations for the Plastics Treaty Negotiations seeks to clarify what constitutes a subsidy, provides examples from other international agreements, and offers key recommendations for negotiators.
The brief includes:
- discussion of what constitutes a subsidy;
- how subsidies are disciplined multilaterally in an SCM Agreement;
- relevant insights from sectoral agreements in the discipline of subsidies;
- proposed elements of plastic production subsidy disciplines under a future plastics treaty; and
- key takeaways for the plastics treaty negotiations.