THE WTO GENERAL DIRECTOR INTENDS TO STRENGTHEN THE THE TRADE COALITION OF STATES MEMBERS LAUNCHING A NEW TURN OF CONSULTATIONS.

Director-General Says WTO To Focus on 'Coalition Building' GENEVA--World Trade Organization Director-General Mike Moore said the organization's focus during his second year in office will shift from "confidence-building" to "coalition-building" among the WTO's members as it tries to build momentum for the launch of a new global round of trade talks. In a BNA interview outlining his priorities for the upcoming work year, Moore admitted that prospects for launching the round in the near term were dim but would improve if continued progress was made on other ongoing trade-liberalization efforts such as the mandated talks on agriculture and services trade, which began earlier this year. "By building coalitions I mean that people see that there's enough there moving in the right direction on agriculture and services, that there's enough there for them that their needs in regards to implementation are recognized, which builds a coalition for more trade liberalization," Moore declared. "Things are moving," he added, dismissing the image of an organization holed up in a bunker since its disastrous, riot-scarred Seattle ministerial meeting. "In agriculture and services and on other issues such as investment and electronic commerce, solid progress has been made." At the same time the director-general admitted that completing the agriculture and services talks will be difficult outside the context of a general round because the organization's poorer members will feel they have little to gain from a limited negotiating agenda. A general round "gives the maximum [negotiating] leverage to the smaller players," Moore said, referring to the fact that a round cannot be completed until all members are satisfied with the results and sign on. "It's possible to complete [the agriculture and services talks] outside of a round, but where is the leverage" for the poorer members? Moore took over the helm of the WTO in September 1999 and was immediately thrown into the frantic and ultimately fruitless preparations for the Seattle ministerial, where members were expected to endorse the launch of a new round. Instead, the meeting ended in disarray after key members such as the United States, the European Union, and Japan were unable to bridge fundamental differences on the agenda for the new round and developing countries lashed out at richer nations for ignoring their concerns, including their difficulties in implementing existing WTO agreements. Since the Seattle fiasco, Moore has concentrated his efforts on rebuilding confidence in the organization among its poorer members, in particular least developed countries (LDCs) . But the results so far have been meager. A call for improved market access for LDC exports resulted in an offer from the Quad Group that was criticized by Moore as well as LDCs as less than generous. Members have also shied away from any significant reform of existing WTO decision-making procedures and failed to endorse Moore's proposal for an annual 10 million Swiss franc (US$5.8 million) technical assistance budget. Some Progress on TRIMs Progress has been made in bilateral talks on requests from some developing countries for extended deadlines to comply the WTO's Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures, which was due to be implemented by January 2000. But Moore said that countries would have to be more realistic with regards to other implementation demands which essentially call for the re-writing of existing agreements clinched during the Uruguay Round.. "We're working hard on that [implementation], but the result has to be real and reasonable," he declared. "It's not about renegotiating a complete round." Moore rejected criticisms voiced by some diplomats that he was concentrating too much of his effort on developing country concerns and should spend more time working with trade officials in Geneva on the launch of the new round. "We have spent more time trying to widen the participation and reaching out to the most marginalized constituents first," he said. "But parallel to that we haven't ignored our core business [of trade liberalization]. We are doing the mandated negotiations, we are widening the agenda, we are continuing the work on issues such as electronic commerce and trade facilitation." Moore said he has been given a few humbling lessons during his tumultuous first year in office, in particular that the "go get'em" style of politics he was so used to in his home country of New Zealand does not play well on the international diplomatic stage. "I've learned a lot about the nature of multilateral systems," he laughed. "Of course I'm impatient. I come from a small country where the political system is very transparent and you could occasionally impose your will. Here the members drive the system and the consensus issue [where WTO decisions are taken by unanimous consensus] is both our strongest point and our weakest point." Looking back on the Seattle ministerial, the director-general said there were probably some things he should have done differently to help forge consensus but that the differences between governments on the key issues were too great to be resolved through his efforts alone. "Perhaps we did try to put too much detail into the launch in the sense that we were negotiating rather than launching," Moore mused. "We didn't want to lose 10 years, so we wanted every paragraph [of the Seattle ministerial text] to be explicit in order to save us time." "But national interests must win the day," he added. "The trick is finding national interests which coincide ... the issues, be it from antidumping to investment to labor, they were just too far apart." Next Ministerial a Quiet One With the scars of Seattle still fresh, WTO members will soon begin preparations for their next ministerial, which under WTO rules must be held once every two years. The location of the meeting has yet to be decided, but the Persian Gulf state of Qatar is the only member so far to have publicly offered to host the event. Moore indicated that there was a strong desire among the membership to make the next ministerial a quiet one and not to link it to any grand goals. "The decision will be made this year on where and when," Moore noted. "But I think we should separate the ministerial from a launch." "A lot of trade ministers are saying, why become a target?" he added. "It would be good to have ministers meet just to report and work things through without the big bang theory...the one thing ministers are sure of is that wherever they are to assemble, they should be very close together on the issues." Director-General Says WTO To Focus on 'Coalition Building' 18/09/2000