World Trade Rules Need Rebalancing

by ADB External Relations Officer & NGO Liaison Bart W. Edes

The global trading system must be rebalanced: Martin Khor, Director, Third World Network

The world trading system increasingly favors the developed countries over the developing countries. Poor nations have in recent years become disenchanted with the system due to a lack of anticipated benefits, problems arising from the implementation of their own obligations, and a lack of transparency and inadequate participation in decision-making.

So argued Martin Khor at the ADB-sponsored seminar on "Doha Development Round; Implications for Developing Asia," held 10 May during the ADB Annual Meeting in Shanghai. Khor, director of the nongovernment organization, Third World Network, believes that "the first priority" in the next round of trade talks should be to "bring the system back into balance."

Other panel speakers included J. Michael Finger, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute, Paul-Henri Ravier, Deputy Director-General, World Trade Organization, and, by taped video, Pascal Lamy, European Union Trade Commissioner. Khor was one of several speakers from nongovernment organizations invited by ADB to participate in the seminar series accompanying this year's Annual Meeting.

Khor asserts that "developing countries are asked to bear for a little while the pain of rapid adjustment¡­whereas the developed countries which advocate this policy themselves ask for more time to adjust in agriculture and textiles (and in other products) which have been protected so many decades." Due to subsidies and quotas maintained in wealthy states, he said, "farmers are becoming uncompetitive in developing countries."

To address these problems, Khor advocates reorienting the World Trade Organization towards development, and says that the body's "rules and operations should be designed to produce development as the outcome." Developing countries, he says, should be permitted "the policy space and freedom to be able to choose between different options in relation to their trade policies."