Trade Helped Developing countries cut poverty- Lamy

| Monday September 20, 2010 00:00

WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy said it was striking that emerging economies were now the most vociferous in calling for conclusion of the Doha round to open up world trade, as they stand to benefit further from a rewriting of global trade rules.

Lamy was speaking a week before the United Nations reviews progress on slashing world poverty through a system of targets known as the Millennium Development Goals.

'So far the multilateral trade system has weathered the crisis reasonably well, developing countries have been protected from... a big wave of protectionism,' he told a WTO forum.

Lamy said the disciplines of the trading system umpired by the WTO, encouraging its 153 members to keep their borders open, was allowing trade to expand by 10 percent this year after contracting 12 percent in 2009 in the economic crisis.

'This is a major contribution to helping developing countries cope with this crisis,' he said. A big change in global trade patterns is that in the last decade, developing countries have been trading more intensively with each other.

This South-South trade now accounts for 50 percent of many poor states' commerce, increasingly replacing old trade links with former colonial powers, he said.

At the same time the rise of global supply chains means that developing countries no longer need to aim to specialise in entire industrial sectors but can be competitive even by manufacturing individual components. (Reuters).