§ Mrs. SpelmanTo ask the Secretary of State for International Development what steps her Department is taking to enable poor countries fully to participate in meetings of the World Trade Organisation. [66185]
§ Clare ShortDuring the normal course of WTO business in Geneva, there can be 26–40 meetings per week which some countries must cover with a delegation of 2–3 people, while others have no representation in Geneva and must follow the issues from their capital. The Ministerial Declaration at Doha made wide-ranging commitments to trade-related capacity-building for poor countries, and stated that
priority shall…be accorded to Members and Observers without representation in Geneva".To meet that commitment, a task force was appointed by interested Ministers to examine the feasibility of expanding an existing organisation, the Agency for International Trade Information and Cooperation (AITIC) into an inter-governmental organisation with a wider mandate than at present. AITIC is a Swiss NGO which has since 1998 been supporting countries with little or no representation in Geneva by drafting briefing notes on difficult issues, offering a neutral forum for discussion, organising workshops and training seminars, running an "early warning system" on key issues, etc. The UK strongly supports this work and has made a commitment of £1 m to support the first phase of AITIC's work as an IGO. This forms part of the UK's overall commitment to allocate £45m (of which £38 million has already been committed) to trade-related capacity-building work between 1998 and 2003.