World business sounds
alarm about prospects for Seattle trade talks
Paris, 26
November 1999 - The
International Chamber of Commerce today said it was unthinkable that governments
meeting in Seattle next week should fail to decide on a new round of multilateral
trade negotiations.
Briefing journalists before
next week's ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization in Seattle,
ICC Secretary General Maria Livanos Cattaui said: "Thousands of our member companies
all over the world believe that the progress of multilateral trade liberalization
must not be allowed to falter."
Mrs Cattaui said the inability
of WTO governments to agree even an agenda for a new trade round augured badly
for the ministerial meeting in Seattle. "With only a few days to go, we believe
it is time to sound the alarm," she added.
"The rules-based mutilateral
trading system is one of the finest achievements of the second half of the 20th
century. Its authority must be upheld if we are not to descend once more into
a world of protectionism, with all the sad and tragic consequences we know so
well."
The ICC Secretary General
said that business supported raising environmental and labour standards. But
she questioned whether it was in the interests of hundreds of millions of people
in the developing world for trade sanctions to be used to enforce these standards.
"By isolating a country,
will we improve labour or environmental standards? It solves nothing to make
people poorer by denying their countries access to external markets. The United
Nations, not the WTO, is the right place to handle these issues."
Mrs Cattaui said she hoped
that the Seattle Ministerial conference would succeed in launching a broadly-based
and balanced round of negotiations to the benefit of all WTO member countries.
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