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| Mexico's candidate for WTO urges Shake-Up | | | SURABAYA, Indonesia: The world's most important trade body needs a major shake-up in leadership to revive the long-dormant Doha round of global trade talks or else it will become irrelevant among newer, fleeter free-trade agreements, said Herminio Blanco, one of the candidates to take over the World Trade Organization.
Mexico's Herminio Blanco, one of five candidates to be next leader of the World Trade Organization, says that the organization is in danger of becoming irrelevant.
Mr. Blanco, who was Mexico's chief negotiator to create the landmark North American Free Trade Agreement and represented Mexico in the last successful global trade round that created the WTO two decades ago, told The Wall Street Journal in a recent interview that the WTO risked becoming a simple referee of its increasingly outdated rules rather than leading global trade.
"The rules of the WTO were drafted 20 years ago, and a lot has changed in the sophistication of countries that decrease tariffs but create new very sophisticated barriers," Mr. Blanco said. "To remain relevant, it must remain competitive vis-à-vis these mega agreements not only in terms of size but in terms of rules."
Mr. Blanco is one of five remaining candidates to take over the 159-member WTO from Pascal Lamy heading into a selection process deadline Wednesday, when the Geneva-based organization narrows the field to two. The timing of an announcement is uncertain.
The other candidates are Roberto Carvalho de Azevêdo, Brazil's permanent representative to the WTO; Mari Pangestu, a former trade minister in Indonesia; South Korean Trade Minister Taeho Bark; and New Zealand Trade Minister Tim Groser.
The Obama administration hasn't openly backed any candidate as WTO chief. Some trade experts said the U.S. is likely to keep a low-key position during the selection process and wait for a consensus pick to emerge. ``It may be like picking the pope in that you don't know what goes on in the room," said Ed Gerwin, a trade analyst at Third Way, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
John Veroneau, who served as deputy U.S. trade representative during the George W. Bush administration, said that nonetheless, the stakes are high for the U.S.
President Barack Obama has been pushing expanded trade as part his goal of doubling U.S. exports by 2015 and stimulating the economy. U.S. officials view the Doha round talks as on life support, but the next head will have the opportunity to start fresh and revive the process, Mr. Veroneau said.
Mr. Blanco spent the past weekend in Indonesia on the sidelines of a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, a 21-nation grouping of Asia-Pacific economies including the U.S., China and Japan where members painted a dire picture of preparations for a meeting in Bali in December to push forward the Doha round, which has languished for years. Even as they discussed Doha, the U.S., Mexico and nine other countries were welcoming Japan into negotiations for a new trade arrangement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is to create a free-trade area among some Pacific Rim countries that will account for 40 % of global output.
''These are mega deals," Mr. Blanco said of the TPP and what he called a "game-changing" effort by the U.S. and European Union to cut trade barriers in a new pact, the Trans Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. ``To think that the relation between the WTO and these kind of agreements can keep on being one of just regulating—and if you look at the WTO 10 years from now doing the same--then the doubts of the relevancy of the WTO are major." Mr. Blanco presents himself as an outsider uniquely positioned to revive the Doha round, though he has been instrumental in some of the biggest trade pacts in recent history. In recent years, he has been president of IQOM Inteligencia Comercial, a trade service that advises national and local governments.
He brings a fundamental free-trade background to the process, with a doctorate in economics earned at the University of Chicago in the 1970s, just as the hugely influential Nobel Economics Prize winner Milton Friedman was finishing a storied three-decade career at the school. |
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