Discurso durante Reunião Ministerial da OCDE, sobre a Rodada Doha - Paris, França, 4 de maio de 2005

Thank you, Mr Chairman,

It is always a pleasure to come here to the OECD, which we learnt to appreciate also as a centre for reflection not only on the problems that affect its own members, but also on the problems that all of us in the world - particularly in the developing world - face. I still remember the days when I worked at the Ministry of Science and Technology, how important the studies of the OECD were for us. Mr Chairman, Let me first of all say that of course we are here today because we give a great importance to trade as an instrument for development. I think it is very clear from the performance of many of our countries, including my own, how much trade can help in solving the problems of growth and employment.

We do see that we can operate at several levels in the question of trade. My own country has been active in trade agreements within our region, more specifically in South America, more broadly in the Americas and other areas, as in relation to Europe, and with other developing countries, which are not an unimportant part of our recent trade dealings, such as with India and the South African Customs Union. These have been part of our effort to diversify our trade goals, and this has paid in a very important way. I don’t want to bother you with statistics but it is very telling that our exports grew by a quite significant amount and our trade now shows an even balance between different regions and categories of countries. We know that there is no substitute for the multilateral trade negotiations, because it is only through multilateral trade negotiations that we will be able to address the main problems that beset our countries.

For one, the question of subsidies and, namely, the agricultural subsidies, which are probably the single most distorting element in world trade. This is a question that we will not be able to solve in bilateral dealings with developed or developing countries or in any kind of regional discussion or negotiation, but only in the WTO. I agree with my friend Rob Portman - and I welcome him as I do with Peter Mandelson for I think this his first time that he is here - when he says that market access in agriculture is essential. But we all have to learn that market access in agriculture will not be sufficiently pushed if there is no solution for the question of subsidies. In a way, although the biggest benefits - as the World Bank has shown - will come probably from the market access opening, these are inextricably linked to the question of domestic and export subsidies. This is what we hope we will be able to address. There are other areas as well.

As it has been said several times, the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) is not about agriculture alone. I am very thankful that my thought was mentioned here that indeed agriculture is the engine, is the locomotive of this round. And if the locomotive stalls, nothing else will move. This is one thing that has to be clear. We of course have other interests, like antidumping. We are also very interested in the development dimension. Sometimes I am a bit afraid that the development dimension is seen only as a concept to be applied to LDCs or to very small economies. We are the first to recognise the special situation of LDCs and weak economies. In all the bilateral dealings in which Brazil has entered with not only LDCs but with countries that have more vulnerable or small economies than Brazil we have applied the principle of asymmetry. We have applied the principle of asymmetry together with Argentina in Mercosul vis-à-vis our smaller partners.

But we cannot accept that the development dimension that is enshrined in the title of the DDA is only about LDCs. It is also about the broader dimension of development for all countries. In this respect, I would also say that another important aspect of DDA is flexibility for development policies. This is something that somehow we renounced to an extent at the Uruguay Round. At the time, the prevailing ideology was a different one. If you opened your markets unilaterally, everything would happen automatically. And this was not the case. So, we do need some flexibility in terms of social policy, technological policy and industrial policy. We have got something in terms of social policy for instance in the question of TRIPs and medicaments, and I hope we will be able to do a similar thing when we address questions like TRIMs or the relation between the bio-diversity convention and TRIPS.

Mr Chairman, I think the WTO is very rich and very creative in always coming up with new names and acronyms. If one spends three or four months outside Geneva, one seems to be lost because the names are totally new. The name in vogue now is “gateway”, and I think sometimes the gateway is not seen as a passage, as something you go through, but as an obstacle. The problem of the AVEs that was mentioned here before is precisely one of these cases. This was not a gateway that was there. It was a block that was put on our road, as the road was unimpeded. So, I would hope that since people are so creative - especially in the OECD circles, where much more is spent in terms of research and development and in intellectual programmes than we can do in our countries - that this creativity should be used not to invent new problems but find solutions.

Thank you very much