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;
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.
