I will refrain from taking you through the World Trade Organisation Consultative Board report point-by-point. It is available for all to see and I trust that it will, indeed, spur some serious thought about the future of this institution. Now may not be the right time – the Doha Round must take priority – but 10 years is long enough without structured, in-depth, contemplation of organizational capacity and practice, with a view to reform.

For the moment I want to tie institutional reform to the World Trade Organisation’s biggest current challenge: making sense of the development perspective in trade rules and negotiations.

By that, I do not just mean making sense of the “development” in the Doha Development Agenda. There is a much deeper challenge that, I know, many of you have long been grappling with – as did the Consultative Board. It really requires us to ask: what is the World Trade Organisation capable of?

It seems to me there are two ways of approaching the issue. One is the Doha Round approach which tends to be the approach favoured by many of the development NGOs. That says: first, the big, enforceable, rules-based concessions should be made by developed countries, preferably in favour of poor members. Second, it says that if developing countries are to liberalize their trade regimes, then that is their sovereign right and should on no account be dictated by World Trade Organisation obligations. They will do what they need to do in their own time without threat or hindrance from the World Trade Organisation or its dispute settlement mechanism.

Hence, the DDA declaration is festooned with references to “special and differential treatment”, to so-called “implementation” issues and to absolute opt-outs for the least-developed countries. I think the intentions were honourable. But they represent the negative approach to using the World Trade Organisation for development objectives. They say, in essence: the name of this game is to get through unharmed and without new obligations – and, for some, with the value of our preferences intact.

This may have been an understandable approach in 2001, but in some respects it was neither realistic nor even desirable. Why? First, a large-scale trade round has to yield balanced results. The major industrial players will make concessions, but when they take the final package back to their legislatures they need to show something in return. Leaving aside the poorest members – the least-developed – there has to be something from the large, advanced developing markets or the deal simply will not work. I will not dwell on that reality.

Second, perpetual insulation from World Trade Organisation disciplines does not help developing countries seeking to reform domestically in the pursuit of export-lead growth. Reform – and that means change – is always difficult. There are always special interests fighting it and political opposition which may or may not be based upon broad appreciation of the overall public interest. That is the case in developed countries just as much as it is in developing countries. Governments in industrial nations have long used the GATT and the World Trade Organisation as the supporting apparatus of reform. The European Union has reformed its agriculture over the past 15 years. You may say, not enough. But farm populations have tumbled to a tiny proportion of what they were – and that has been politically a very hard path to follow. It would not have happened – and will not continue to happen – without the framework of constraints provided by the World Trade Organisation.

But some of you will say, poor countries are just not ready to reform, they cannot survive in the global economy, they have too many other problems to resolve first. And I will say to you: absolutely, I agree. The question is, what do we do about it, and where does the World Trade Organisation fit in? Did this question ever get serious attention from World Trade Organisation representatives in Geneva? If it did, it is a well-kept secret.

Under what conditions do World Trade Organisation membership and World Trade Organisation obligations become positives in the development equation? There is a temptation to say that they simply don’t until a variety of fundamentals are in place. All countries need basic health care services as a fundamental of development. All countries need primary and secondary education systems. Property rights need to be secure. Administrations should be efficient and not corrupt. Small businesses need to be able to borrow money at reasonable interest rates, so efficient financial services are a fundamental. Efficient financial services only come with reliable commercial and other courts.

Further along the road, insurance services become important. The ability of local manufacturers and farmers to buy imported inputs at reasonable prices for their businesses becomes a prerequisite for being competitive. Tertiary education must turn out the graduates necessary to move development on to new planes. The reduction of red tape, technology transfer, debt relief, veterinary services, better roads, efficient ports and so on. All these and many more factors weigh in the development equation.

So, apart from having some impact on imports what relevance does the World Trade Organisation have to all of this? In fact, more than many of you may suspect. A whole range of World Trade Organisation agreements and commitments impinge to some extent on every one of these pre-requisites of development. Customs valuation has to do with corruption; services commitments can impact healthcare, education and financial services; SPS impacts veterinary services; TRIPS affects technology transfer. I will not go through all the correlations. Though I should add that a good trade facilitation agreement would add substantially to the list.

My only point is that the World Trade Organisation can be as relevant to the early stages of development in poor nations as it is to the fortunes of large firms in industrial nations. But the question remains, how to use it appropriately and positively.

And that is where I come back to two aspects of the institutional issues raised in the Consultative Board report. The Board recommended more involvement of ministers and senior officials and also the establishment of some high-level advisory machinery. Further, it stressed the importance of facilitating the very regular presence in Geneva of developing country ministers and officials from capitals.

Why did we do that? Precisely because the development issues I have already described – and which differ from member to member – do not get discussed properly here. This is an institution of negotiation, of legal precision and obligation. Actually, it is a lawyers’ paradise. That does not make for broad discussion of the hard practical economic, commercial, social and political issues that concern policy-makers on the ground. Geneva constantly lacks a dimension: that of real life.

Developing countries say they want special and differential treatment: industrial country members say the least-developed countries can have anything they like but the others must open up. It is not very sophisticated and it is hardly surprising that the negotiating process regularly seizes up. It is not that there is an absence of real analysis of trade and development issues; it is just that they are not very evident in this building.

How should we discuss the specifics trade and development? The Trade and Development Committee is too low level. The Committee on Balance of Payments is only sporadically relevant to the debate. The Trade Policy Review Mechanism currently does not do the job and developing countries can see a decade pass between successive reviews.

The Consultative Board proposed a senior officials’ consultative body that ministers could attend if they wish. That is the level at which this debate needs to be pursued. This is the kind of body in which high-ranking trade or finance ministry officials, or ministers, from developing countries could come to Geneva and state clearly to their opposite numbers precisely what are their domestic preoccupations and why they are taking the positions they are. Whether it is debt, commodity prices, healthcare problems, foreign policy issues, conflicts with preferential trade agreements, civil war, infrastructure or emigration – why should not these factors be aired in this place? Yes, this is a rules based system, but we are not precluded from understanding what the rules do! Remember, we are talking about a consultative body that has no executive power and is divorced from the negotiating processes.

But understanding what trade and development is all about – I hear you protesting – is not enough. Where is the action? That brings me finally to one small and probably forgotten paragraph of the Consultative Board report: paragraph 175, which concerns the so-called “coherence” agenda. We call upon the Director General to make full use of his 1996 mandate to build upon the agreements between the World Trade Organisation the World Bank and the IMF. We propose the World Trade Organisation participate in “horizontal coordination” on an equal footing with the two institutions and that other organizations are engaged also.

I know that Dr. Supachai and his staff have already done much in this area. For instance, we have seen the mainstreaming of trade in the poverty reduction strategy paper process. We have also seen the integrated framework initiative. But the new Director-General should consider going much further.

Out in the field, there are a lot of people – from multilateral agencies, UNIDO, NGOs, bilateral donor organizations, consultants – working hard on specific aspects of the trade picture in poor countries. In truth, there is a lot of money floating around out there. But it is not clear that it is always well spent. More particularly, it is not clear that it is spent in a coordinated manner based on a shared understanding of the trade-related priorities and overall development strategies. As a result, the potential benefits of World Trade Organisation conditions and membership are pushed to one side.

All the more so since the one set of people least present on the ground is the World Trade Organisation secretariat. However many seminars and workshops may be arranged on World Trade Organisation law, the people who know the World Trade Organisation best are neither trained to make the link with commercial, development-related practicalities nor are they encouraged to be so. They are too few and do not have the time. We need a bigger secretariat, but one ready to deal with the real world as well as trade law.

The International Trade Centre does terrific work, but is too small for sustained interventions at the country or sectoral level. UNCTAD, UNDP and UNIDO make their contributions. At the other end of the scale the Bank and the Fund have plenty of people and lots of money. They do some heroic work: IMF efforts on customs reform are vitally important, for instance. Yet they are not always especially familiar with the World Trade Organisation and tend to take a limited economist’s view of practical development challenges.

Prescription from above is often resented and not always effective. How much better to get out among individual firms and farmers on the ground (as do NGOs), find out what their problems are, and then see where the World Trade Organisation rules and commitments can make a positive contribution.

I do not mean to belittle anybody’s work in the trade field – and perhaps I am being deliberately provocative. But I cannot help feeling we are only scratching the surface of the potential to make the World Trade Organisation a truly effective tool of development.

Until we take on this challenge I fear poor nations will be unable to capitalize on their World Trade Organisation membership. They will continue simply to defend their space from further encroachment by trade rules. And that is a pity.

This is the text of a speech delivered by Peter Sutherland at a World Trade Organisation Public Symposium