Fair Trade of Alcoholic Beverages
A resolution to reduce barriers to free trade and commerce.

Category: Free Trade
Strength: Mild
Proposed by: Mikitivity

Description:
The NationStates United Nations,

AWARE that in some societies that the consumption of alcoholic beverages is illegal or heavily regulated;

NOTING that other societies allow the consumption of alcoholic beverages, but place heavy tariffs on imported alcoholic beverages, citing both quality of imported products and domestic based economic impacts;

CONVINCED that protective tariffs based solely on protecting and stimulating domestic economies can be detrimental to a free economy;

1. RECOGNIZES the right of UN members in which the actual consumption of alcoholic beverages is illegal or heavily regulated to maintain their restrictions on the import of foreign alcohol, provided that these members also do not engage in exporting their own domestically produced alcoholic beverages into other UN member states;

2. DEFINES a protective alcoholic beverages tariff to be any additional tax or charge placed on a similar type of non-domestically produced (i.e. imported) alcohol beverage;

3. ENCOURAGES nations to drop any protective alcohol tariffs on UN members and to freely engage in the global marketing, exporting, and importing of alcoholic beverages;

4. DESIGNATES any nation that has dropped all of its protective alcohol beverage tariffs on UN member imports as being in compliance with this accord;

5. AUTHORIZES any compliant nation to enact specific protective tariffs in response to tariffs placed on its alcoholic beverage exports by individual nations, provided that:

(a) these protective tariffs are limited to only similar alcoholic beverages coming from a nation which first enacted protective tariffs against the compliant nation's exports;

(b) these protective tariffs are approximately equal in net magnitude and / or economic cost;

6. RECOMMENDS that exported alcoholic beverages should list all of their ingredients and alcohol content so that the importing nations may assess both the purity and similarity of the exports.

This is just a draft proposal, and though I've not submitted it to the UN proposal queue yet, I wanted your feedback.

Some brief background:
Originally the idea was to make a resolution promoting beer trade, and thus in Oct. 2004 I wrote a proposal and submitted it to the proposal queue and to the UN forum. A number of nations no longer active in the forum made some useful suggestions and the proposal changed to include all alcoholic beverages (wine, whiskey, etc.) It was then tabled, because of a lack of interest in Free Trade issues.

However, given the high number of repeals, I wanted something in the proposal queue for UN Delegates. While there are plenty of other interesting ideas, I still wanted to purpose a weak Free Trade resolution.

This resolution is weak / "mild", because not all nations are capitalists like mine. I wrote this so they could opt out of the resolution, but that by doing so, other nations that participate in the program wouldn't be unfairly subjected to tariffs.

In the past week there have actually been some significant changes based on the current roster of UN forum regulars ... the most significant changes were to limit the restriction on tariffs to other UN members, meaning you can still lock your market partially without problems from the UN. It is kinda of having your cake and eating it too!
:clapping: