Pascal Lamy Turns Up In India

Pascal Lamy Turns Up In India

Pascal Lamy took his campaign for Director General of the WTO to India this past week.

Monica Gupta reports in the Business Standard: "Lamy seeks consensus pitch for top WTO job"

"According to Lamy, the new director-general's work is pretty much chalked out for the year, with the Doha round and the Hong Kong Ministerial in December being top priority.

"Many developing countries don't have a permanent contact with the system (WTO). The WTO secretariat, which tends to become bureaucratic, should be more developing country-friendly," he said.

"The director-general will also have to work towards building a better working relationship with other institutions like the Unctad, the World Bank and the IMF. As D-G of the WTO, he has the mandate to do that," he said adding that a candidate from a developed country like himself could exercise the necessary clout to achieve this objective."

Should developing countries support a European Director General?

"Asked if he considered his EU background to be a disadvantage for garnering support from the poorer countries, Lamy said, �On the contrary, there were several occasions where I, as trade commissioner, had taken a stand contrary to the view of domestic constituency.�

I was extremely unpopular in France due to my stand on agriculture. Similarly, concessions on drugs given to developing countries under TRIPS (Trade related intellectual property rights) was extremely unpopular with the pharma industry in EU."