Eliminating or preventing trade barriers and coordinating regulatory actions, especially in emerging technologies, are the top priorities.
Far from preventing trade in rare species, CITES and most other conservation groups now want to design better ways to regulate that trade and to monitor its effects.
The EU's draft text for a trade and sustainable development chapter also appears to draw an equivalence between the need to prevent trade distortions and the fight against climate change.
On January 18th, the Home Office indicated that it intends to try to extend labour laws aimed at preventing trade unionists from intimidating people in their homes to cover animal-rights activists.
But American employers are allowed to hire permanent replacements.To prevent trade deals becoming a back-door route to rewriting American laws, Mr Bush's trade team suggests that the free-trade deals require countries either to comply with the ILO standards or to pass labour laws that are equivalent to America's.
Helen Yaffe, an LSE fellow who specialises in the Cuban economy and has spent years living in Havana, says: "You have to start with the blockade [which has prevented trade and investment from the US since 1960], although you don't want to always sound defensive.
Arrests were made under legislation to prevent Trade Union action, and it was alleged by some protesters that officers used pressure points, detailed in this video, to inflict pain on people who were passively resisting.
Vadim Malkin, director of research firm Russian Axis, said the "courageous minority" of companies that have already invested or set up shop in Russia would probably use their clout to prevent trade relations from deteriorating, which he doubted would happen anyway.
Starting in 1973, CITES attempted to prevent trade in body parts of endangered animals, such as the skins of crocodiles.
