Race heats up for WTO reins

Lamy is being seen as the candidate of the rich north countries while Cuttaree is believed to have the backing of Caribbean countries, along with their Asian and African member states in the ACP group of countries. Uraquay’s former WTO ambassador Carlos Perez de Castillo is the third candidate seeking to replace the current WTO Director-General, Thailand’s Supachai Panitchpakdi at a May 31 general council meeting.

The importance of a developing country candidate at the helm of the WTO is all the more pertinent given the apparent deliberate strategy of the "rich" countries to tighten control of the multilateral development agencies as shown by US insistence of hard line conservatives for the appointment of World Bank Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton as the US Permanent Representative at the UN.

For the developing countries of the ACP, having Cuttaree at the helm is one way of ensuring that international trade is driven by key development issues, especially access to markets without a series of non-tariff barriers and not simply by the economic interests of rich countries.

KD Knight, a former President-in-Office of the ACP Council of Ministers and Jamaica’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, believes that Cuttaree’s knowledge of this diverse group and indeed of the entire WTO membership "allows him to better appreciate their trade and development needs."

Since the inception of the GATT and its successor, the WTO, no member of the three constituent regions of the ACP Group has ever occupied the top post. Dr PI Gomes, Guyana’s recently-appointed ambassador to Brussels, said developing countries which have found themselves at odds with the richer members now have a great opportunity to make a change at the helm of the WTO.

"The WTO will be around now as the watchdog of a globalised trading regime, supposedly based on a set of rules but the question is often times minimal regard for transparency and access to decision-making on the rules as far as the primary and basic needs of ‘small developing countries’ are concerned," Dr Gomes said in an interview with Business Day from his Brussels office.

"So much is said to be done by ‘consultation’ but many times Small Developing Countries (SDCs) are not invited to the consultations or they’re given short notice, have limited technical expertise to make meaningful contributions or can’t attend."

But whoever emerges as the new Director General will surely have major challenges on his hand at the next full WTO Ministerial in Hong Kong in December. This follows the disastrous Fifth WTO ministerial in Cancun in 2003 when the meeting broke down over the insistence of the EU, Japan and South Korea that negotiation of agreements on investment, competition, government procurement and trade facilitation — the so-called Singapore issues — should begin. Caribbean countries were among member WTO states that strongly opposed the launch of negotiations on the Singapore Issues and were determined that issues like special and differential treatment, services, agriculture and non-agricultural market access, be given priority.

"There was little or no progress in these issues," the Caricom group said following the collapse of the Cancun meeting.

At the Hong Kong meeting, WTO members are aiming to produce an accord to reduce tariffs and subsidies at the year-end summit which could lead to a binding trade liberalisation treaty by the end of 2006.