Assignment 2: Case 5-1 “America's Cuban Conundrum”

International Marketing 505

1.) Analyze the key issue that prompted the EU to take the Helms-Burton dispute to the WTO.
The EU took the Helms-Burton dispute to the WTO because they felt that it violated international rules dealing with trade. The EU had a dispute with the U.S. regarding testing agriculture, trade and investments and biotechnology issues which were brought to the attention of the WTO found the following: The EU, concerned about the effect of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), proposed a Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA) in 1994, and the U.S.-somewhat reluctantly-went along. There was to be no TAFTA to complement NAFTA, however: only a renewed political gesture in the form of the 1995 New Transatlantic Agenda (NTA) ("EU/US Summit,”). Its main lasting effect was the Transatlantic Business Dialogue (TABD), the first transatlantic lobby, which brought about agreements on testing and certification as a step toward defining a new trade agenda. It also envisioned the creation of a New Transatlantic Marketplace (NTM) within which trade barriers between the U.S. and EU would be largely dismantled.(Padgett,2009)
Continuously diluted, in 1998 the NTM became today's Transatlantic Economic Partnership (TEP), a limited agreement slighting key issues, particularly agriculture, audiovisual services, and culture. This failure to develop substantive transatlantic regulations means reliance on the World Trade Organization's (WTO) dispute settlement process for airing differences. As the cold war settled down in 1990, the U.S. rebuffed EU calls for a formalization of relations through a transatlantic treaty, preferring a network of informal relations ("EU/US Summit,”).The above issues lead EU to take Helms-Burton dispute to the WTO. The EU could have worked an agreement with