High-ranking trade officials from 31 landlocked countries at a United Nations-sponsored meeting in Paraguay today called for stronger provisions on transit through neighbouring countries, and other measures to gain access to world markets, to be incorporated into World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements.
In the “Asunción Platform,” adopted at the conclusion of the two-day conference, representatives also called for enhanced “special and differential treatment” for their countries, full integration into multilateral trading system, technical assistance and simplified accession for landlocked countries not yet members of the WTO.
“It is of the essence that the landlocked developing countries strengthen their cause by presenting to the WTO a unified position on measures necessary for the effective participation in the international trading system if they are not to remain sidelined from the main thoroughfares of international trade,” UN Under-Secretary-General Anwarul Chowdhury told the opening session of the conference yesterday.
The Asunción Platform targets the next phase of the Doha round of trade talks, expected to take place in Hong Kong, China, in December 2005. The Doha Development Agenda was adopted in 2001 in the Qatari capital in an effort to achieve freer trade worldwide, particularly for developing countries.
Similar issues were covered in principle at the landmark UN conference on transit transport cooperation among landlocked and coastal developing countries, held in Almaty, Kazakhstan, in 2003. But inclusion in WTO agreements would be a decisive step in putting those principles into action, conference organizers say.
Mr. Chowdhury said the object was to get the international community to take into consideration the economic vulnerability of landlocked countries and grant access to markets and to support programmes of technical assistance to overcome handicaps of geographical isolation and underdeveloped infrastructure.
Costly and time-consuming overland shipping across borders and inadequate infrastructure add costs to trade transactions of landlocked countries that sometimes exceed the value of the goods themselves. UN studies show that a landlocked situation slows the economic growth rate of a country by 0.7 per cent.
The Asunción meeting is organized by the United Nations Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States (OHRLLS), headed by Under-Secretary-General Chowdhury, with the support of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and the Special Unit for South-South Cooperation of the UN Development Programme (UNDP).