"Stress test” of the multilateral trading system still to come — Lamy
26 May 2009
Director-General Pascal Lamy, in his report to the General Council on 26 May 2009 as chair of the Trade Negotiations Committee, said that “it is crucial that we keep our monitoring system on the alert and that we advance towards the conclusion of the Doha Round.” “A more solid house will resist the strong political winds which we unfortunately have to forecast,” he added.
Let me start by welcoming today the participants to the Geneva Week for non-residents who have the opportunity to attend this General Council meeting. I am pleased that we again have been able to synergize the Geneva Week and this session so as to allow participants to get the overall picture of what is happening here.
Since my last report to the General Council in February, the economic situation has continued to worsen for all WTO Members. Trade has become a casualty of this crisis. Our forecast shows that world trade will contract by 9 per cent this year, driven lower by the collapse in global demand and by shortages of trade finance that have created supply-side constraints to export growth, in particular in many developing countries.
No-one can foresee how long this recession might last, nor how deep its consequences will be on our social fabrics, but there can be no doubt either about the fragility of the world economy or about the central importance of trade in the recovery.
This current global economic crisis has taken centre stage at a number of international meetings I have attended recently and I wanted to share with you some of my impressions and conclusions from these gathering as well as from some of my recent bilateral meetings. I would also like to provide you with my sense of the way ahead in the Doha Round over the next couple of months.
As you know, I participated in the G20 meeting in
