UN trade chief calls for resumption of talks to boost poor nations’ agricultural exports

The head of the United Nations agency that seeks to integrate developing countries into the global economy has called for the speedy resumption of the so-called Doha round of trade talks, underlining the critical need to open up industrialized nations’ markets to agricultural and other exports from the world’s poorer states.

“The suspension of the talks hurts the world’s poorest most acutely,” UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Secretary-General Supachai Panitchpakdi told the organization’s governing body in Geneva yesterday.

“Countries’ prospects for export-led growth and development have diminished with the suspension of the Doha Round,” he said, referring to the talks which have been in limbo for months, partly over subsidies from wealthy nations to their agricultural industries, tariffs and quotas, which all shut poorer agricultural countries out of the market.

“The distortions caused by subsidies in world agricultural trade will persist at the current level, thereby jeopardizing the prospects of developing countries to generate additional export revenue and income from agricultural exports, including cotton,” he added.

But if the current round of negotiations concluded with a substantial development-oriented outcome, it could bring gains for economic growth and poverty alleviation.

On Monday, Secretary-General Kofi Annan called on the world’s wealthy countries to “go the extra mile” to re-balance the rules of the trading system in favour of the poor and push ahead as soon as possible with the Doha Round.

“I join developing and least developed countries in calling for the round to resume as soon as possible,” he said in a message to the World Trade Organization (WTO) Public Forum in Geneva.