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WTO Prepares for New Round of Talks, Says Moore
The World Trade Organization (WTO) shall make every effort to hammer out an agenda for a new round of talks so that ministers can put final touches to it in Qatar in November, said WTO Director-General Mike Moore at the parliamentary meeting on international trade which opened Friday in Geneva.
He said the negotiations in Geneva on liberalizing trade in agriculture and service have made progress and that it is of urgent need to broaden the negotiating agenda beyond agriculture and services.
Manufacturing has been at the heart of every previous round.
There are still many damaging trade barriers in manufacturing while most of their burden falls on developing countries. Then manufacturing has to be at the heart of a new round of talks if it is truly to benefit developing countries, said Moore.
The WTO director-general said there are risks in not launching a new round of talks as the world economy is looking vulnerable.
Failure to launch a new round of talks this year could also jeopardize the multilateral trading system itself. Everyone would lose from this, but the biggest losers would be the poor and the weak, Moore warned.
According to the just released WTO Annual Report 2001, the world economy is retreating from the high growth path seen last year, dimming the prospects for world trade in 2001. An upsurge in protectionism could make things much worse. The virtuous circle of trade liberalization and economic growth could all too easily become a vicious spiral of protectionism and stagnation.
The parliamentary meeting on international trade, which will end Saturday, is the first-ever global parliamentary meeting on international trade organized by the Inter-Parliamentary Union.
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