A new WTO round is needed for major results: Mike Moore

It has been a difficult first year for Mr. Mike Moore, the second Director-General of the World Trade Organisation. He assumed office in September 1999, after a bitter selection process, less than three months before the institution's third ministerial meeting in Seattle.

In the brief period before the Seattle meeting, Mr. Moore was unable to get the WTO's members to agree on a ministerial declaration. Those differences were carried over to the ministerial meeting in December, where against the backdrop of street protests, the conference ended in chaos and failure without launching a new round of trade liberalising negotiations as the U.S., the European Union and the WTO Secretariat had hoped for.

Since then Mr. Moore has been engaged in efforts to restore some faith in the WTO. (Mr. Moore dismisses suggestions that the WTO is finding its feet after Seattle. ``It is always on its feet. And it never strode the world like a colossus. It always moves forward one step at a time.'') While the WTO members have entered the first phase of implementing an earlier agreement to start talks in 2000 on reducing agricultural subsidies and opening the service sector further to global trade, Mr. Moore earlier this year embarked on a number of ``confidence-building measures'' which he saw as crucial to building support among the developing and least developed countries (LDCs) for the system.

These measures included an attempt to revive the talks on the ``implementation concerns'' of the developing countries - a set of 54 proposals to redress imbalances in the existing WTO/GATT pacts which had prevented them from reaping the promised benefits of the controversial Uruguay Round (1986-1993)of trade negotiations. Other measures include greater sensitivity to the LDCs and getting all member-countries involved in the talks.

Where does the WTO stand a year after Mr. Moore took over and on the threshold of the first anniversary of the Seattle meeting? In an interview with C. Rammanohar Reddy last week at the Geneva headquarters of the WTO, Mr. Moore talks about what the WTO has been doing since the Seattle conference. Excerpts:

There is a mixed picture at the WTO. The preliminary discussions on further negotiations in agriculture and services are going on smoothly. But the confidence-building measures that you initiated after the Seattle failure do not seem to have gone very far. For instance, some officials from the developing countries say that nothing has happened at the WTO talks on the implementation issues.

Seattle was not the first time that a meeting of the WTO/GATT ended without an agreement. And given the kind of issues involved for some countries to not get an agreement was an honourable solution.

Regarding implementation, it is a bit of a cheap shot to say that nothing has happened. You cannot pass that opinion until the end of this year, since we are still in the middle of consultations. It is true that nothing has been put down on paper. But we have spent days and days discussing the issue. We have open, transparent meetings where everybody can attend. I know of one person who criticised the implementation process but he had not cared to attend any of the meetings.

I am told that 25 per cent of the proposals put forward by the developing countries are close to becoming ``doable'' by the end of the year. The others may require a great deal of technical work. The implementation proposals were in any case never meant to reopen and renegotiate, within one year, everything that was agreed upon during years of negotiations during the Uruguay Round (1986-1994). In the end we can make the clouds but not the rain. In the end, it is up to the governments to make commitments to each other.

There is the other complaint that even the LDC Initiative, the special WTO approach for the least developed countries (LDCs) has also not delivered anything so far.

We now have 27 countries who say they will make a definite offer on preferential access to exports by the LDCs. Promises have been made before, but this is the first time that concrete offers will be made. The E.U., for instance, says that everything other than armaments and sugar is on the table. This is unprecedented. I have recently done a follow-up with ministers from the developed countries on their offers for the LDCs. I want to be in a position to say at the coming UNCTAD meeting on LDCs that X amount of market access worth Y million dollars will be made available, so much of technical assistance for capacity-building will be provided and so on. That will be definite progress.

Take the Integrated Framework for the LDCs. Ministers decided four years ago at the Singapore WTO meeting on this approach. Yet it is outrageous that nothing had happened. It had only delivered travel points for some bureaucrats. Now we have got hold of it, set up a separate unit and actually narrowed our responsibilities. Here again I am hopeful that by the end of the year we will have definite progress to report. If we don't, we will have to say that the institutions are incapable of doing what the ministers instructed them to do.

On participation by the world's poor countries in the WTO negotiations..

Our meetings are open. We are having open meetings today (October 17), tomorrow and the day after to discuss implementation proposals. We can make more time available. We are doing practical things to help countries with modest missions in Geneva to fully participate in the process. Identifying point people they can contact, providing them with early alerts, regular bulletins to keep them informed. You have to be a pretty mean- spirited modest mission not to say all this has not been of some assistance. You have to be a pretty mean-spirited non-resident mission not to say you are not receiving weekly reports on what is happening at the WTO.

There is this point of view that the WTO is a negotiating machine. And that outside of negotiations it just grinds to a halt.

What we are doing now is building blocks, which one by one are part of a foundation to make the institution useful to its members. Addressing the implementation issue is one way by which we are putting the blocks together. The discussions on implementation are taking an enormous amount of time and we want reasonable results from the process. But will we get all the results we want from these discussions? Of course not. In my heart I do not believe that we can get all the results our members want without wide-ranging negotiations. There are certain things that will not be negotiated outside a new round of trade talks.

When then do you think the membership will be ready to launch a round that could not be started in Seattle? Before or after the next WTO ministerial next year?

I do not want to predict a date. When the members of the WTO are ready to launch a round of trade negotiations they will do so.

Has the air cleared since the anger of Seattle? There was a lot of mistrust there.

It has not cleared completely. But the atmosphere now is much better. I know that a few people regret the speeches they made in Seattle. But at different levels, officials from our member- countries are now engaging each other in a constructive process. There used to be a word that people would use which would infuriate me last year. Whenever a proposal was made, people would immediately say it was ``unacceptable''. They are not saying that anymore. There is no pre-judgement of issues, no presumptions. That is progress.

If there was one single issue that contributed to the Seattle collapse, it was the position on labour standards taken by the U.S. and the E.U. Has their position changed over the course of the past year?

I do not see flexibility on this issue from either side (the U.S. and E.U. on one side and the developing countries which opposed the proposal on the other).

Do you think the U.S. and the E.U. now realise that they can no longer run this institution like the way they used to until the 1980s? That what they say no longer goes?

No single country owns this institution. It belongs to every member-country. The dynamics have changed. I am the first non- European Director-General of the WTO. The Uruguay Round had 90 countries, now there are 139 countries. Members of the WTO secretariat have been challenged on some issues. They have changed, they continue to change and we have to change further.

A few years ago the dispute settlement body (DSB) used to be hailed as one of the success stories of the WTO. Now it is being criticised for so many reasons. That the text of the agreement was drafted badly; that the disputes panels and the appellate judges are going beyond their mandates and creating new obligations; that the appellate judges are passing rude comments on the panellists' rulings. What is your view?

Those comments on the DSB are a bit harsh. It is a new system, new to international architecture. It is not a tablet from God. It is man-made. Of course, it can be improved. But no one has questioned the `honour' of the system. I do not think anyone wants to abolish it.

I would have thought it would be held up as a model for other global institutions. Like Mr. Kofi Annan could do with such a body for the Middle East - with both sides committing themselves to the results of an independent panel. That does not mean our system is perfect. We are going by custom, convention and past practice to make the system work better.

Do you not see the proliferation of regional trade agreements as undermining the WTO and the multilateral system? That the smaller countries, in particular, are getting marginalised in the process?

I am a great believer in multilateralism. It is the best option but is not the only option. Regionalism too can be a force for good - look at the E.U. I can see why the business community finds regionalism an attraction - because they can quickly measure its benefits. I see a threat in regionalism in the sense that the political capital that is better invested in a multilateral system goes into the development of regional agreements.

If you are looking at the costs of not having a new round of trade negotiations at the WTO then regionalism could lead to some costs.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Business
Previous : Godrej Sara Lee plans IPO
Next     : The games they play