Director-General Pascal Lamy “We must remain extremely vigilant”

Thank you Ambassador Agah. I am pleased to be able to present to the TPRB my Report on recent trade and trade-related developments associated with the financial and economic crises. I would like to spend a few minutes introducing the Report and describing where I would welcome further guidance from the TPRB so that I and the Secretariat can continue to try to address the concerns and support the needs of WTO Members in this exercise.

I believe that this is an important initiative in the TPRB. It reflects the responsibility of the WTO to play an active and constructive role in helping to manage the current, very difficult, global economic situation and to promote an early end to the recession and the restoration of strong, sustainable growth in world trade. The speed with which the economic situation deteriorated since the financial crisis in September last year has meant that there has been little time to carry out the extensive consultations with Members that typically precede an initiative of this kind in the WTO. We are all having to feel our way as we go.

I took good note of the concerns that some of you expressed in the General Council last week about the mandate and the purpose of this monitoring exercise. Let me reassure you that the seeds for this initiative were not sown in Davos, nor in the G-20. This is a home-grown initiative that started in the WTO and that, I believe, should continue in the WTO as long as the global economic situation justifies it. Last October, I established a task force in the Secretariat to advise me on the trade implications of the financial crisis. Several Members suggested to me at the time that this was an exercise of broad and general interest to WTO Members, and encouraged me to share the task force results. You may recall proposals made at the HODs meeting on 12 November, for example by Ambassador Hisham Badr of Egypt on behalf of the Arab Group, that I report in writing on the work of the secretariat task force and that there be a discussion among Members on the trade impact of the global financial crisis. Those proposals were supported by other Members from developed and developing countries. I made a statement about this at the 17 December TNC, and we discussed it at the 18 December General Council. This meeting today is the follow-up to those discussions.

This must be a Member-driven initiative if it is to be successful. It needs to be carried out by, and for the benefit of, the whole membership, or the “G-153” as Ambassador Navarro of Bolivia said last week. I do not believe there can be any doubt that the WTO membership has a responsibility to monitor policy developments that are having an impact on international trade and on the multilateral trading system, nor that all WTO Members have a strong interest in doing so. Switching on the radar to provide ourselves with as much information and intelligence as possible about trade-related policy developments around the world is crucial in current economic circumstances, where trade growth has already stalled globally. The fragile economic prospects of every WTO Member have become especially vulnerable to the introduction of any new measure that closes off market access or distorts competition. It is particularly the case for developing countries, because economic growth is so heavily trade-dependent for so many of them.

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