As noted in the proposal itself, bee-keeping is important not only for its [direct] commercial value but also because it increases the chance that there will be enough bees around to pollinate various useful species such as several types of fruit-tree.
It would be good for your economy.
Question: Is this really an 'international' issue'?
Answer: Its only binding clause concerns international trade, and international trade is by definition an international issue, so yes it is.
Question: Is this really an important enough topic to be worth WA legislation?
Answer: With the crop-pollination factor added to the more direct economic importance, I think so. After all, we've recently had three resolutions passed on the single subject of tissue & organ transplants, and I'd argue that this topic is potentially at least a third as important as that one overall (i.e. to the entire nations, rather than just to the people directly affected), so if we can have three resolutions for that then why not one for this?
And it's not as though this proposal was somehow interrupting a sequence of more important submissions, after all...
Question: Isn't this an attempt at 'micro-management?
Answer: No. The first of the two 'operative' clauses only "urges" the actions listed, which means that although we think they'd be a good idea you wouldn't actually have to do them, and because of that fact I'd argue that that clause doesn't count as 'managament' of any kind. Admittedly the second operative clause is binding, but that can be boiled down to "(A) If it's legal to own the stuff in your nation then it has to be legal to import & export it too, subject to a few common-sense limitations [i](and to any restrictions that you also place on domestcially-produced equivalents); and (B) you can't tax imports of these goods at higher rates than you do domestically produced ones (except to balance any subsidies placed on them in their countries of origin')[/i]: That doesn't look like "micro-management" to me, anyhows...
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Ursiosina RedRose, who is the Commercial Attaché for Bears Armed's mission here, enters the chamber and adds a new document to those that are being circulated _
Current draft
Promotion of Bee-Keeping
Category: Free Trade
Strength: Mild
Description: The World Assembly,
Happily aware that Bees not only play a major role in pollinating many species of plants, including quite a few species that are useful to people, but can also produce both honey and beeswax in quantities that makes their harvesting by people worthwhile,
Open to the fact that keeping one or more hives can therefore provide people with a useful supplement to their diets and incomes, as well as assisting the pollination of some local crops,
Not at all happy that some nations might, for one reason or another, play unnecessary restrictions on bee-keeping;
Enthusiastically urges all WA member nations to _
1. Legalise bee-keeping, without setting unreasonable limits on whereabouts keepers may allow their bees to roam;
2. Legalise both domestic and international trade in hives or swarms of bees, honey, beeswax, bee-hives, and other relevant goods;
3. Refrain from imposing unreasonably strict or petty regulations upon bee-keeping and the associated activities, and from taxing these matters at rates that would render them not worthwhile for the bee-keepers;
4. Recognise the legal right of people from adjoining nations to reclaim swarms of bees that those people owned within those other nations under those other nations' own laws but that have strayed or even been lured across the international border;
5. Ensure that training in bee-keeping and in the processing of the bees’ products is available easily enough within their jurisdictions to meet the needs of any of their people who are interested in this possibility;
6. Discourage the reckless use of general-purpose insecticides, because those could harm bees (and other useful insects) as well as the 'pest' species that people actually want to get rid of;
Yearning to ease international trade in these goods, enacts that (subject to any restrictions imposed by earlier GA resolutions that are still in force) all WA member nations are required _
1. To allow the importation and exportation of any bees, bee-keeping equipment and/or products of bee-keeping of types whose possession would be legal within their borders, without unreasonably strict or petty regulation, subject to any restrictions that they apply to international trade in general in time of war or other national emergency, except as is genuinely necessary to prevent the spread of disease;
2. To limit any place customs duties, tariffs, or other taxation, that they place on the international trade in bees, bee-keeping equipment, and/or the products of bee-keeping, to levels that do not exceed taxation on the internal trade in such goods within their borders, except that if any imported goods received government subsidies within their country of origin at higher rates than equivalent goods are subsidised within the receiving nation then additional tariffs may be imposed to balance that difference.
