The Hindu Business Line : India among 50 nations invited to Unctad XI in Brazil

AS many as 50 heads of state including India have been invited to take part in the eleventh session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) scheduled to be held in Sao Paulo in Brazil from June 13 to 18.

Addressing a news conference here, Director, International Trade in Goods, Services and Commodities, Unctad, Ms Lakshmi Puri, said the organisation meets every four years to set priorities and guidelines for the organisation, besides offering an opportunity to debate key economic and development issues, particularly those relating to trade, investment, finance and technology.

She said the Unctad Conference would have four sub-themes viz., development strategies in a globalised world economy, building productive capacities and international competitiveness, assuring development gains from the international trading system and trade negotiations and partnership for development.

Ms Puri said the search for coherence both between global processes and national strategies among the various sectors of the global economy assumes added relevance, since assuring development gains from international trading system and trade negotiations remain a key aspect of the agenda. She said the conference is expected to send a positive message on successful and development-oriented conclusion of Doha negotiations and provide a synoptic view of the interface between multilateral trading system, regional trading arrangements and the development dimension.

She said that the Unctad programme for developing countries consists of two components. One is to help the policy makers and officials of the member governments gain enough mastery in negotiations through technical assistance, including research and analysis of the problems plaguing the developing countries. The second, she said, is through organising capacity building programme for other stakeholders, including the non-governmental organisation, research groups, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and scholars to face the challenges of globalisation.

Ms Puri said that in this regard a workshop has been organised here as part of the second component with the purpose of integrating the stakeholders in different segments of the economy so as to enable them to encounter the challenges of globalisation and liberalisation.

She said that focus has been on important segments of the developing countries' economy such as leather, tourism, handicrafts, agriculture and fisheries so that the stakeholders in these fields could garner the requisite capacity and ability to respond to the challenges posed in the form of ever-changing standards and regulations in the importing countries.

She said that as much as 90 per cent of the international trade in goods today are subjected to some form of standards out of which most are set by private companies operating in the importing advanced countries.

Ms Puri said that international trade is governed by market muscles of multinational companies that possess vast network and supply chains in the form of huge retail outfits.

She said that standards set by these retail companies in the importing countries are sometimes more stringent than that prescribed by the International Labour Organisation.

She said that developing countries exporting their products into these markets need to be prepared to face the new form of protectionism through due process in the form of testing standards, laboratories and certifying agencies.

The capacity building programme organised by the Government of India, UK aid agency DFID and Unctad would go a long way in imparting the training in this regard to gain successful outcome in trade negotiations, she added.