The Financial Times has published a transcript of interviews between Raphael Minder and the two remaining WTO Director-General candidates, Pascal Lamy of France, and Carlos Pérez del Castillo of Uruguay: Transcript of interview with Pascal Lamy and Carlos Pérez del Castillo. (May 3 - subscription required)
FT: If the next WTO ministerial meeting in Hong Kong is a failure, will this bring an end to the idea of advancing trade liberalisation through multilateral rounds like Doha?
Pascal Lamy: Hong Kong should move us two-thirds or three-quarters of the way. Now if Hong Kong is a failure, it will no doubt postpone the end of the round. But before deciding whether that would be a disaster, let us also remember that the previous round lasted eight years and it had a smaller number of countries involved. In the end, is it better to have a round than a sectoral approach?
At the end of the Uruguay round, the conventional wisdom was that we should have no more rounds and that the future was for sectorial negotiations... but finally we went back to the idea of a round. My own sense is that you can only have successful negotiations if you can present negotiations as a win-win for all the partners.
In that respect, dealing with negotiations sectorially is much more difficult. It is much easier to negotiate when you have a bunch of topics on the table, from which you can present your offensive and defensive strategy. So the usefulness of a round has to do not with so much with the technicalities of trade negotiations but with the pedagogy of negotiating.
Carlos Pérez del Castillo: I think it would be a disaster for multilateralism if we failed in that (Doha) round and this is why I feel that at the end of the day wisdom will prevail. The agreement is a must if we want to preserve the credibility of multilateralism.
The alternative to multilateralism is a very complicated and dangerous scenario in which I can see not only a proliferation of regional and bilateral agreements of all sorts, which would further erode the non-discriminatory principle, but I also see conflicts arising between regions and protectionism. We will go back to where we were when the GATT was created.
I don't think that we can afford to lose multilateralism. Deep down people realise, particularly developing countries, that it is in the multilateral trading system that we have the greatest assurances that unilateral actions and discrimination will not be applied.
The interviewer also asks the candidates what they would bring to move the Doha round along, whether or not the WTO dispute mechanism can cope with the Boeing-Airbus controversy, whether they are concerned about US and EU protectionism with respect to Chinese textile exports, why they would be a better DG than their rival, and missed opportunities for WTO reform.
The interviews are described in this story: "WTO rivals put their cases" . The details of the responses on the Chinese textile question are described in this story: "WTO rivals caution against Chinese textiles curbs" .
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