President Mahamadou Issoufou of Niger: “We’re living in shocking inequalities, with many people in developing countries living in poverty.” He drew a parallel with Ford automobile production, suggesting that just as Henry Ford wanted his employees to be able to afford his company’s cars, higher incomes in the poorest countries would help growth in the North. He said that often in the South, they have the sentiment that industrialized countries would stop trade opening if it is not in favour of their comparative advantage. He blamed speculation in derivatives markets for increased grain prices, which threaten food security in the whole Sahel Region. Noting that his country faced high energy and transport costs, President Issoufou appealed for the WTO to help countries like Niger through the Aid for Trade programme.

World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Director-General James Leape: Mr Leape said that the world’s current growth path would use up more resources than exist on the planet. He said: “we’re still acting as if we have a planet and half to support us” and added “we’ll need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as in the last 800.” The only path to sustainable growth is a path that is ecologically sustainable, he stressed. Sustainability, therefore, is more than just another special interest to be addressed in the trade regime. There’s a strong role for the WTO to ensure that perverse subsidies are reduced. More broadly, beyond combating protectionism, which too often has protected Northern interests against Southern ones, there’s a role for the WTO to support the pursuit of sustainable development.

International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Director Dr Maximo Torero: Dr Torero stressed that trade has an important role in ensuring access to sufficient food in the decades to come. He noted the supply of key food is quite concentrated in few countries so export restrictions are serious threats and markets can quickly become vulnerable to volatility. On speculation and food practices, Dr Torero said that some level of speculation is good, since it provides liquidity to the markets. “Excessive speculation,” however, can be dangerous, since it can exacerbate volatility, with consequences for poor people. Defining what constitutes ‘excessive’, however, is complicated.

WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy: On important and long term issues such as food security, said Mr Lamy, we need to activate the transmission belt between offer and demand that is trade — thus the need to move on in the Doha Round. He said that ending the impasse in the negotiations would enable the WTO to tackle other challenges — and it would also answer expectations by developing countries that the multilateral trading system can respond to their hopes for an end to subsidy-driven unfair competition for their agricultural products. He suggested that the Ministerial Conference scheduled for December would provide an opportunity for governments to find a way forward on Doha, possibly on issue-specific agreements that respond to the needs of developing countries. He noted that the past 20 years had seen considerable convergence between the trade and environmental communities, illustrated, for instance, by the evolution of WTO jurisprudence. On the “Made in the World” initiative, he said negotiators tend to still refer to the realities of the international trade of 20 years ago. He said global value chains have positive effects on development; small countries that would have been unable to produce automobiles of their own can still competitively make auto parts as part of a chain.

The debate was rich on a spectrum of issues raised by panellists. In response to questions about trade and exchange rate fluctuations, both Niger’s President and Mr Lamy noted that the issue was simpler under the pre-1970s international regime of fixed exchange rates. Mr Lamy stressed that the WTO was not the forum for addressing exchange rate levels — the IMF and the Financial Stability Forum exist for that. Nevertheless, he observed that there was no longer a taboo at the WTO on discussing the trade implications of exchange rate movements — in fact, a WTO working group (the Working Group on Trade, Debt, and Finance) has started a discussion on the issue.

Asked whether the institutional design of the WTO, with its consensus focus and veto for every member, was to blame for the Doha impasse, Mr Lamy noted that the source of disagreement was an old-fashioned difference between two groups of countries about how much to open their markets. He said that consensus would remain as a core principle of the WTO, not least because finding an alternative would be harder than Doha. Procedural issues, such as whether to retain the single undertaking or to authorise plurilateral agreements, would need to be determined.