Trade Negotiations Insights • Volume 7 • Number 3 • April 2008
LDCs rising: the growth of technical capacity
‘Technical assistance’ and ‘capacity building’ are phrases often bandied about in trade policy circles – generally, how poor countries need more of both.
Depending on who is talking, technical assistance and capacity building mean different things. To name just a few: better equipping government officials to identify their countries’ interests and pursue them in trade negotiations, helping nations build regulatory frameworks and implement trade liberalisation obligations, or even aid for countries to build the industries, roads, and ports they need to participate in the global economy.
Not surprisingly, the need for all of the above is most pressing in the world’s poorest countries.
Calls for technical assistance and capacity building – especially for least-developed countries – have become a hallmark of international economic summits. They have given rise to a wide range of initiatives run by an alphabet soup of institutions, from the International Trade Centre (ITC) and the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO), to the more simply named World Bank.
The gradual acquisition of capacity
While the needs remain great – the WTO’s own ‘Aid for Trade’ initiative is being set up for this very reason – there is now heartening evidence that the world’s poorest governments are increasingly well-equipped to identify and articulate their interests in global trade negotiations. In other words, capacity – at least in this realm – is being acquired.
WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy paid heed to this when addressing a summit of LDC trade ministers in Maseru, Lesotho in February.2 “The presence, the strength, the technical capacity of the LDC group has tremendously increased in recent years,” he said. “LDC-specific priorities are now well known to everybody.”
This had meant increased leverage for the group in multilateral trade negotiations, he said: if WTO Members manage to conclude the struggling Doha Round trade talks, duty and quota-free market access for LDC exports – one of the group’s key demands – would have to be part of any accord.
The attendance list for the Maseru meeting provided elegant proof that other countries were responding, said David Luke, a senior trade advisor to the United Nations Development Programme. “A few years ago, you would not have seen China, Brazil, the EU, and India show up at an LDC meeting to explain their positions.” Several long-time observers of trade negotiations had noted the “increasing sophistication” with which the LDC group was making specific demands.
Improvement dates back to 2005
Mark Pearson, Programme Director of the Regional Trade Facilitation Programme, a Pretoria-based DfID-funded initiative that works with several African economic blocs and the LDC group, traced the marked increase in negotiating capacity to the group’s preparations for the WTO’s Hong Kong Ministerial Conference in 2005.
That year, he said, Zambia became the coordinator of the LDC group, and made a strong effort to promote cooperation among members aimed at developing consensus on different negotiating positions – notably, requests for duty and quota-free market access accompanied by simplified rules of origin, and concessions on services trade. Achieving solidly-backed common positions on certain issues was a significant achievement in itself, given countries’ varied commercial interests.
Credit was also due to Zambia’s trade minister at the time, Dipak Patel, who “was a dynamic character who had a personal interest in making something happen at the WTO.”
Donor funding, notably from the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, helped underwrite the creation of a technical team that backed LDCs’ efforts to develop joint positions. The LDCs also received support from inter-governmental organisations and civil society groups such as the Advisory Centre on WTO Law, the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, and the South Centre.3
These positions were then presented to other countries. Pearson said that Zambia was able to mobilise wider support for the LDCs’ objectives, with representatives from the LDC group meeting formally and informally with the influential G-20 bloc of developing countries, for example. This meant that “when we went to Hong Kong [in December 2005], we were not starting from scratch.”
LDCs now need less external assistance
In June 2005, LDC trade ministers met in Livingstone, Zambia to iron out a common position before the Hong Kong meeting. The recent gathering in Lesotho was similar, but the process leading up to the Maseru summit demonstrated how LDCs’ negotiating capacity had improved in the interim.
“The LDC group needed much less external assistance” than before, Panitchpakdi Supachai, the former WTO chief who now heads the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), said in Maseru.
As is typical for such summits, trade ministers only put the finishing touches on the declaration adopted there. Much of the drafting was done well before the meeting by officials in Geneva, culminating in draft declarations that were put first to top officials and then to the ministers.
What was different this time, explained the Regional Trade Facilitation Programme’s Pearson, was that while in the past, groups like UNCTAD, the South Centre, and others directly influenced the declarations’ content, this time, the LDCs themselves prepared the declaration “and no one [else] had any input” (which is different from providing background support). The declaration had been drafted by LDC delegates in Geneva, and had “buy-in” from their respective capitals.
Proactive engagement vital
The LDCs’ reliance on any single organisation has indeed decreased, according to Tlohelang Aumane, a trade official with the Lesotho mission in Geneva who is currently coordinating the LDC group at the WTO. Instead, the LDCs now go to different institutions depending on the specific matter at hand – for instance, the Advisory Centre on WTO Law on some issues, ICTSD on others, and so forth.
UNDP’s David Luke attributed the “upward trend” in LDC capacity to proactive action on the part of the countries themselves – such as Lesotho’s continuation of Zambia’s “exemplary” leadership – coupled with the fact that “previous technical assistance has worked.”
Balla Moussa Keita, an affable former football player who heads the WTO division at Mali’s commerce ministry, is an enthusiastic supporter of one such technical assistance programme – the courses for developing country trade officials offered by the WTO’s Institute for Training and Technical Cooperation (ITTC). Funded by the Dutch government, the “terrific” ten-month course in Geneva enabled him to participate in “all activities” of the WTO, he told TNI in Maseru.
Since his return to Mali, Keita said that the course had helped him improve the implementation of national-level technical assistance and capacity building projects under the multi-agency Integrated Framework and Joint Integrated Technical Assistance Programme.
WTO participation better, but more
support required
Not all is rosy for participation at the WTO by the world’s poorest countries. Several LDCs do not even have representation in Geneva. Those that do are notoriously understaffed – with a handful of trade officials scrambling to cover the large number of meetings at the WTO, not to mention other fora like UNCTAD or the International Telecommunications Union.
That said, since 2005, LDCs have helped mitigate their individual limitations by enhancing cooperative procedures for work at the WTO in Geneva. Countries serve as ‘focal points’ covering each of the different issues in the negotiations, and then report back to regular meetings of the full LDC group for further instructions.
In Mark Pearson’s view, this system is “quite sustainable – except when experts leave.”
While it is not uncommon for experienced trade delegates to leave government service, the losses are felt most acutely by LDCs, for whom expertise is hardest to replace.
“The main problem [LDCs] face is institutional memory and continuity, as well as the time they can commit” to WTO issues, said Pearson.
Another challenge facing the LDCs, according to Geneva-based sources, is to get better at translating their clearly-articulated political demands – say on rules of origin or exemptions for LDCs from anti-dumping duties – into detailed legal text that could be part of future WTO agreements. In the ongoing Doha Round negotiations, ‘text-based’ negotiating proposals, in which countries submit legal language for what they want a future accord to look like, are one of the principal vehicles for influencing the content of the draft deals assembled by the chairs of the various negotiating committees.
Part of the reason for this shortcoming, Pearson suggested, was that LDCs had insufficient “technical backup” to respond to changing situations in negotiations. LDCs are “willing to go to battle, but often don’t have… the ‘in situ’ backup they need.” Capital-based officials might have the expertise, but limited budgets meant that they could not always be on hand in Geneva when needed.
LDC Secretariat could bridge gaps
In an attempt to address such concerns, several LDCs have broached the possibility of creating an ‘LDC secretariat’ in Geneva, to support the group’s work in negotiations at the WTO. A permanent secretariat, funded by multiple donors, could provide continuous logistical and technical support to the group’s rotating leadership.
Lesotho delegate Aumane said that the creation of a secretariat could significantly ease the burden of coordinating the LDC group, noting that the group of African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP) countries already had a secretariat in Geneva.
LDC missions remained seriously overstretched, he noted, observing that many of them relied on the WTO’s mission internship programme just to be able to attend committee meetings.
Aumane, who is normally based with the trade ministry in Maseru, said that his own presence in Geneva for the duration of Lesotho’s coordinatorship of the group was supported by the useful programme, which allows participants to work with their countries’ missions in Geneva.
“Capacity has increased,” he said, speaking of the LDC group as a whole. “I cannot say that capacity now is enough,” he added, however. “We are still least-developed countries, with low levels of development and scarce resources to allocate. The gap we are trying to close is great. But things are evolving.”
1 Trineesh Biswas is the editor of Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest at ICTSD. For the latest edition see: www.ictsd.org/weekly/index.htm
2 The LDC ministerial meeting in Maseru, Lesotho, February 27-29. For more details see: www.ldcgroups.org/?lang=en
3 For further reading see documents: Doha Development Round: LDCs in the End Game, an ICTSD dialogue with the African Economic Research Consortium and the Centre for Policy Dialogue, Bangladesh, Montreux, March 15-16 2008. www.ictsd.org/dlogue/2008-03-15/2008-03-15-desc.htm