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Poor nations can wrest gains from rich: WTO head

Poor nations now have the power to wrest gains from the rich in a new set of world trade talks that will focus on development, World Trade Organisation chief Mike Moore said on Monday.

But they must work with the WTO to improve their "capacity" to negotiate and then exploit trade opportunities, he told Reuters in an interview on the final day of a whistle-stop tour of Africa.

"One major part of the development agenda is that the developing countries have put conditionality on the developed nations," Moore said.

"They are prepared to discuss investment, competition, government procurement, transparency, on the condition that we do something about capacity".

After six days of haggling and months of fraught behind-the-scenes discussion, trade ministers from more than 140 countries agreed in November to launch a new series of talks that aim to lift barriers to free trade in goods and services.

Many poor countries had resisted the idea of a new round, arguing that a lack of negotiating expertise, business acumen or infrastructure, and a failure of rich nations to honour earlier agreements, meant they gained little from previous talks.

They were won over by inclusion in the project's agenda of issues such as debt and technology transfer and big power pledges to review their problems with earlier accords.

Moore said the WTO was now working hard to improve its understanding of what poor countries need if they are to get a foot in the door of world trade.

"We must take away any reason for countries to say 'No' to capacity building," he said.

The organisation has already been reshaped to boost its development programme, with the creation of a Development and Economic Research Division. It has fleshed out a negotiating structure and agreed a venue for the next ministerial meeting.

WTO BORN AT DOHA

"I think we're a couple of years ahead of time," said the New Zealander. He has visited the Ivory Coast, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa to meet ministers and heads of state in the past six days and stress the WTO's commitment to development.

"We didn't want people to think we had reeled them in and were going to leave them alone," he said.

Moore, who embarked on the Africa tour straight after a World Economic Forum meeting in New York, said the trip had revealed a change in attitude to his organisation.

"African leaders now see the WTO in a much more positive light," he said. "I think in Seattle we buried GATT and created the WTO. Now we must change good words into good deeds."

WTO talks in Seattle three years ago collapsed, with poor nations complaining that their views were not being heard -- a constant criticism levelled at the WTO's predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

Moore, a former New Zealand prime minister who stands down from the WTO later this year, is adamant the new talks must succeed. But agriculture is bound to be the sticking point.

Wealthy countries spend more than a billion dollars a day subsidising agriculture, or "making food more expensive," as Moore puts it.

He says liberalising agriculture would amount to five times current foreign development aid and eight times the debt relief.

"In the end if issues of agriculture are not solved, there will be no progress -- and there must be progress."

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