Responses to the perils as well as the potential of globalization will be assessed by ministers of trade, development and finance at the tenth meeting of the UN Conference on Trade and Development, from 12 to 19 February in Bangkok, Thailand.
UNCTAD X is the first major global conference of the new millennium, and the first opportunity to assess at a ministerial level the concerns that lie at the heart of an impasse in international decision-making in the fields of international trade, investment and finance.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a 1999 conference preview that the Bangkok meeting should provide a propitious occasion for "an honest and objective review of the policy and institutional framework for global trade and finance from the perspective of development, and a time to take stock of past and recent economic initiatives and development paradigms".
In a press briefing delivered today at UNCTAD headquarters in Geneva, UNCTAD Secretary-General Rubens Ricupero said that the UNCTAD meeting could advance a “healing process” that would help trade negotiations regain momentum.
Concerns about the qualitative impact of globalization have been at the forefront of public discourse since Seattle. French Ambassador Philippe Petit, president of UNCTAD’s Trade and Development Board, said at today’s briefing that “issues discussed at length at the Davos World Economic Forum are those that are on the agenda for Bangkok”. Ambassador Petit chaired the preparatory meetings for UNCTAD X.
World forum on globalization
After the breakdown of multilateral trade talks in December in Seattle, we urgently need a "world parliament on globalization", Mr. Ricupero said in a speech delivered 10 January in Berlin. UNCTAD X is the best opportunity at hand for that purpose." Rather than pass laws, he explained, the UNCTAD meeting will fulfill the parliamentary role of serving as a formal arena for equitable discussion of conflicting points of view by representatives of all major stakeholders.
Mr. Ricupero noted that a string of events taking place as the last century ended -- including the inconclusive results of the Seattle talks, abandonment of negotiations on an international investment agreement, and conflicts over how to deal with currency and financial crises in Mexico, East Asia, Russia and Brazil -- share two features. They indicate that governments and international organizations are having a harder time in agreeing on meaningful responses to a rapidly changing world economic profile, and they reveal difficulties in effectively engaging civil society in debate and decision making.
Conference organizers expect that the high-level interchanges at UNCTAD X -- involving 199 member States -- will allow for freer discussion and a wider diversity of views than often prevail in trade negotiations or in meetings of multilateral institutions where voting is weighted according to financial status.
The deliberations will be aided by a number of preliminary and parallel events.
These include an economists´ round table and a panel discussion bringing together heads of UN agencies, which will be opened by Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Both events will take place on 12 February in the main plenary hall of the conference. At the 19 February conference closing, a panel of Heads of State and Government will discuss policy responses to globalization, also in the plenary hall.
Parallel events in Bangkok will involve civil society organizations, the business community, and international agencies including the Bretton Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank), the World Trade Organization and the International Labour Organization.
The Conference will be chaired by Supachai Panitchpakdi, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Trade of Thailand. Among the chiefs of international agencies addressing the conference in the context of interactive debates will be IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus, on 13 February (in his final appearance before retirement); ILO Director-General Juan Somavía on 15 February; and WTO Director-General Mike Moore and World Bank President James Wolfensohn, on 16 February.
Dr. Supachai is slated to succeed Mr. Moore at the helm of the WTO in 2002.
The 145-country-member UNCTAD Trade and Development Board has suggested that UNCTAD X should review and assess development trends that have taken place since the ninth trade and development conference. Globalization figured prominently in talks at UNCTAD IX, held in 1996 in Midrand, South Africa, and wide-ranging discussion of the effects of liberalization and of the growing role of the private sector often led to a considerable narrowing of North-South differences on key development issues.
But much that has happened since 1996 has drastically altered the prospects for international development for better or for worse: a series of seismic global financial shocks and increased volatility in international financial flows, global spread of the Internet and e-commerce, two WTO ministerial meetings, adoption of poverty eradication as a central goal of the Bretton Woods institutions and closer cooperation between them and the UN.
The UNCTAD X host country of Thailand presents in its own recent history a microcosm of 1990s development experience. Held up as a national model for social and economic progress through most of the decade, it was at the epicentre of the currency and stock market crises that swept East Asia in late 1997. But the national economy has rebounded surprisingly swiftly, although the country still has to face the difficult task of addressing the negative social impact of the crisis.
