Moore's First Priority At WTO: Helping The Poor

Mike Moore, taking over as new head of the World Trade Organization, pledged on Wednesday that he would devote "all efforts" to help poor countries to benefit from freer global trade. He also called on the richer powers to play their part by throwing open their markets to goods from poorer regions. The former New Zealand prime minister said that addressing the plight of the poorest members had to be a key element of the agenda for the WTO's third Ministerial Conference at the end of this year. "The very poor, the (48) least-developed countries, still don't get the access they need for their products and the technical assistance to fully engage so that they can sit at the table of our global family and share equally and fully. "It would not cost the rich nations much to wipe away barriers for the poorest countries," he said. As Moore, 50, began his three-year term in office as the trade body's third director-general, a handful of anti-WTO demonstrators outside its lakeside headquarters chanted slogans denouncing it as a tool of multinational companies. "God is dead, the WTO has taken over from him," read one slogan they pinned on railings at the front gate. "That's a bit flattering, I would have thought," quipped Moore, who has a working class background and was a labor union firebrand as a youth. He is the first non-European to lead the WTO or its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Anti-free trade groups, ranging from high-profile, well-financed environmentalists to groups from poorer countries, are planning huge protests during the ministerial meeting in the U.S. west coast city of Seattle from November 30 to December 3. Moore, a down-to-earth politician with a strong popular touch, was firmly backed by the U.S. in the hard-fought campaign for the director-generalship -- partly on the grounds that he was the best candidate to address their concerns. After an often acrimonious squabble lasting several months between his backers and those of his main rival, Thailand's Deputy Prime Minister Supachai Panitchpakdi, it was agreed they would each serve for three years, with Moore going first. The stocky, one-time printer's assistant said he would be very ready to meet groups opposed to free trade -- as he once did -- and discuss with them the role of the WTO and the benefits open markets can bring to all. Barbara Bordogna, a leader of the small protest set up by an international group called "Coordination Anti-Millennium Round", told reporters they believed "that the free trade model is incompatible with sustainable development." The ministers from the currently 134-member countries of the WTO are expected to agree at Seattle to launch a new round of trade liberalization negotiations starting next year. Moore implicitly challenged the protesters' argument as he spoke to reporters in front of the building. He said the system of negotiating trade agreements on a multilateral basis, started under the GATT when it was founded in 1948 and continued since the WTO took over in 1995, had produced "the most sustained increase in living standards in the history of our species." Through its system of enforceable rules, agreed by all member governments, "the WTO has created not only a system where the little guy has a say, but where he can protect and defend his trading rights," he said. "At our Ministerial Conference ....it is vital that WTO Member Governments dedicate themselves to finding solutions to the problems of the poorest countries. We need those solutions now, not in seven or eight years," the new WTO chief added.