Minister Proposes Modelling it After UN
By Heather Scoffeld
January 1, 2000
Ottawa -- The fumbling World Trade Organization is in bad need of repair, and should be "reinvented" to look more like the United Nations, says Canada's Trade Minister, Pierre Pettigrew. "The WTO needs to be reinvented, somehow," Mr. Pettigrew said in a recent interview. "You need to have more effective governance for the WTO. One idea I am toying with is that maybe it is time for the WTO to have its [own] security council."
The new and improved WTO would have a two-body design much like the United Nation's General Assembly and Security Council, with a handful of countries making key decisions on behalf of the entire world, Mr. Pettigrew said. The members of the security council would be diverse, from countries of all levels of wealth, and not just the rich, industrialized ones. Possibly, each country on the council could represent a block of other countries.
The revamped WTO would also have official links to other international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the International Labour Organization and some groups affiliated with the UN, Mr. Pettigrew said. Calls for a major restructuring of the WTO have grown louder since trade ministers from around the world met in Seattle last month in an attempt to launch a new round of multilateral negotiations. Their attempt failed, and any hope for a new round now seems far off.
Experts are partially blaming the huge differences between rich and poor for the collapse of the negotiations. Developing countries complained about being shut out of the decision-making talks, and they balked at proposals from rich countries to include environmental and labour standards in the WTO.
Experts are also blaming the well-organized opposition to the WTO from environmentalists and nationalists in developed countries, while support from the business community was quiet and weak. Some experts have also blamed the structure of the WTO itself for the Seattle failure. With the United States, Canada and the European Union pushing for a more transparent process, the Seattle talks were all supposed to be held in public. But WTO members quickly realized that with 134 countries trying to speak at the same time, a meaningful discussion could not be held.
The WTO broke the talks off into sections, but the real negotiations seemed to take place in so-called "green room" meetings -- private meetings that included only a handful of countries. Mr. Pettigrew said the WTO apparatus needs to evolve so decisions are made in a way that is transparent, efficient and effective. "If you want to give more transparency, well, you need to have a way of making decisions that will be more effective because you can't [air] in public every consensus-building exercise," he said.
Mr. Pettigrew will take his idea of a two-body design modelled on the UN to a series of meetings in the United States and Europe next month. The idea has been mentioned by other trade ministers as well, from countries such as Britain and Singapore.
But Canadian trade expert Michael Hart says trade ministers need to have some more fundamental proposals on the table than "just tinkering with the institution" if they want the WTO to work. "To say everything must now be redone and so on is going too far," said Mr. Hart, senior associate of the Ottawa-based Centre for Trade Policy and Law. "The green room process worked fine for years, until they started to exclude people deliberately."
In Seattle, the United States and the EU huddled secretly to cut deals, while everyone else was left out, he said. The informal green-room system should be revived and made more credible under strong leadership from WTO director-general Michael Moore, he said, because a UN-type system would upset what has made the WTO work. "The moment you to go towards a system of formal division of power . . . then you immediately get into a different kind of organization. And the strength of the WTO has always been that it's a member-driven organization."
Instead, if trade ministers really want to launch another round of multilateral trade negotiations, they should take time to build up domestic constituencies -- not just business lobbyists, but actual companies -- that will support the talks, Mr. Hart said.
In Canada, only Western farmers were outspoken about the need for the Seattle round, he added. The biggest hitch, however, to launching a new round is the lack of leadership from the United States, Mr. Hart said. U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky has not been sensitive to other countries' needs, and has not tried to cajole other countries into negotiations.
"They failed to provide leadership over the last five or six years. They've been a very self-indulgent country, very parochial," he said. "Leadership is not saying to the rest of the world: 'We've done everything, and it's your turn to catch up, and if you don't, we're going to hit you.' That's called dictatorship ."
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