6th May 2009

Bridges Weekly - Lamy Tapped to Lead the WTO for Another 4 Years

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Pascal Lamy, who has served as director-general of the WTO since September 2005, will continue to lead the organisation for another four years, WTO Members unanimously confirmed last week.

The announcement came as no surprise, as Lamy was running for the position unopposed. The former French bureaucrat has won many supporters at the WTO; Members often speak favourably of how he has managed the organisation, especially how he has balanced the interests of developing countries with those of the group’s rich-country Members, over the past four years.

“I am sure that the next four years will be tough, I’m sure various pillars of our system will be tested, but I am confident that we will be able to steer through these troubled waters,” Lamy told trade officials when he accepted the post in a meeting of the General Council on 30 April.

The 62-year-old marathon-running Frenchman began his career as a bureaucrat, working at both the Inspection Générale des Finance and at the Treasury in Paris. He later served as chief of staff for the president of the European Commission and as CEO of the French bank Crédit Lyonnais before becoming the EU’s Trade Commissioner in 1999.

Several ambassadors praised Lamy’s reappointment, saying that his staying on in the post would bring critical continuity to the WTO’s work.

Doha the ‘Number One Priority’

The day before he accepted the reappointment, Lamy outlined his priorities for the organisation in a speech to the General Council. Concluding the Doha Round of trade talks remains a ‘litmus test’ for the WTO and should continue to be the organisation’s first priority, Lamy stressed, noting that he believed that delegates are already 80 percent of the way to finalising the modalities for a global trade deal.

To that end, the director-general made clear that he believes that the agenda of the Doha Round, which has been progressing in fits and starts but eluding closure for nearly eight years, should not be expanded. Some have argued that the WTO should broaden its scope of work to address issues like climate change, food security, energy, labour concerns, and other issues that lie beyond the current mandate. But the director-general has no plans for such a shift.

“My own sense is that our capacity to project ourselves into the future depends on our capacity to make the present happen,” Lamy said.

The status quo will also hold with regards to the WTO’s consensus-based approach to decision-making, Lamy told delegates. Some observers have criticised the consensus requirement as overly burdensome; Lamy himself famously described the WTO’s approach to decision-making as ‘medieval’ in 2003, one year before he took the top post at the global trade body. But today the Frenchman seems to have become a consensus convert; he insisted to delegates last week that ensuring the support of all Members is critical insofar as it “increases the legitimacy of agreements” reached by the global trade body and shrinks the distance between policy-making at the multilateral and domestic levels.

Lamy also told delegates that he wanted to ‘de-dramaticise’ the organisation’s periodic ministerial conferences, which in the past have been marked by violence and protests. The director-general stressed that the gatherings should be kept relatively low key, and that they should focus on reviewing the WTO’s activities “across the board,” rather than on the Doha Round negotiations. He also suggested that such a high-level meeting could be coming up soon.

“We have not had a ministerial meeting since 2005 and my own sense is that we should not close 2009 without one,” Lamy said.

ICTSD reporting.

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