3 October 2014: Representatives from civil society, academia, business, governments, and inter-governmental organizations convened for the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) annual Public Forum. The Forum, which focused this year on three sub-themes — trade and jobs, trade and consumers, and trade and Africa – took place on 1-3 October 2014, in Geneva, Switzerland.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said trade provides important fuel for economic growth, but cautioned that its benefits can be distributed inequitably, bypassing women, young people and the least advantaged, and leaving environmental degradation in its wake. He further elaborated on trade’s “profoundly negative impacts” on the environment in the form of carbon emissions emitted through production, transport and the consumption of traded goods, and urged the integration of least developed countries (LDCs) and land-locked developing countries (LLDCs) into a more sustainable trading ecosystem. Ban also called for “an open, fair, rules-based and development-oriented international trading regime,” which would correct market distortions, permit LDCs to benefit from duty-free and quota-free exports, and address countries’ internal impediments to trade such as bureaucratic inefficiencies, lack of productive capacity and inadequate infrastructure.
Roberto Carvalho de Azevêdo, WTO Director-General, said WTO’s goal “is to open markets but it is also to support less developed countries to participate, to prevent harmful practices, and to provide a fair system where rules are agreed by all, where disputes are settled in an open and transparent manner, and where everyone has a seat at the table.”
Przemyslaw Kowalski, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), stressed that trade both creates and destroys jobs, and that, even though there are gains in the aggregate, localized effects may be positive or negative. Generating public support for trade, therefore, will require policy-makers to make the labor force aware of the aggregate benefits and help it to adjust. He further discussed the increasingly sophisticated patterns of global trade and global value chains, observing that countries tend to specialize in tasks rather than products, which makes jobs in any domestic setting depend on foreign inputs. He said the production process is therefore fragmented, and there is a more intimate connection between trade and technology, which makes it hard to disentangle the two when discussing jobs.
Roland Schneider, Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD, called for an end to “low-cost” approaches that relocate jobs overseas, and advocated “social upgrading” to ensure that multinational enterprises are not taking unfair advantage of relatively unprotected workers in countries with fewer regulations.
On Africa, Paul Brenton, World Bank, noted that while there is particular potential for trade in agriculture, an emerging trade in the manufacturing sector is generating jobs. In terms of trade-related infrastructure, he said more liberalization and predictability are required, the main beneficiaries being small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the poorest people in the region. Frank Matsaert, Trademark East Africa, said that while people speak of Africa as a market for extractives, the continent has been riding on the wave of a services and construction boom. [UN Press Release] [Public Forum Webpage] [Remarks of UN Secretary General]