Singapore Government Press Release
Media Relations Division, Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts,
MITA Building, 140 Hill Street, 2nd Storey, Singapore 179369
Tel: 6837-9666

Your excellencies, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,

This award comes as an unexpected honour. I am cheered by the recognition that fDi magazine has given to those who labour to promote cross-border trade and investment.

This evening, I would like to acknowledge the great contribution of the World Trade Organisation towards making this a better and more civilized world.

The World Trade Organisation has brought hope to many developing countries after the end of the Cold War. It has demonstrated that globalisation and open markets can give hundreds of millions of people a better life, provided the rules are transparent, fair, and equitably applied to all countries, rich and poor, big and small. Singapore provides a small example of how, through the global trading system, a resource-poor city-state can achieve progress beyond our own expectations within a generation.

China provides the big example. The policy of reform and opening up introduced by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 launched China on a new growth path. Despite all kinds of internal and external difficulties, the country persisted in working to join the WTO. Since China’s accession to the WTO in 2001, its external trade and inward investments have soared. China attracted US$52.7 billion in FDI in 2002, overtaking the US as one of the world’s top FDI destinations in that year. With strong GDP growth averaging over 9 per cent per annum, household incomes in China have risen rapidly in the last 25 years, beginning in the coastal regions, but increasingly spreading to the inland provinces as well.

India provides another big example. In this century, the take-off of China and India will alter the course of world history. So many poor countries in the Third World, long mired in despair, can now hope for a much better future through the WTO.

The continuing generosity of the developed world is crucial for the health of the multilateral trading system. Singapore benefited from such generosity in the early years of our development. Until 1997, Singapore was a beneficiary of the General System of Preferences. During the battle to win hearts and minds during the Cold War, the Western countries wooed Third World countries with aid and concessionary trade. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, this enthusiasm to help developing countries has weakened. Trade negotiations with developing countries, including negotiations to launch and conclude the Doha Development Agenda, now have a harder edge. Developing countries are now expected to pay.

Carried too far, this new attitude by the developed world will create new problems. If developed countries turn protectionist just when developing countries are making progress as exporters, international trade politics will turn sour. Migration from developing countries to developed countries will become unstoppable. And if poor countries becoming failed states for lack of assistance, the problem of terrorism will become much worse.

It is therefore crucial for all of us that negotiations on the WTO Doha Development Agenda be put back on track quickly. The stakes are high, very high. Should Doha stall, every country, big or small, would make alternative trade arrangements. Eventually, the world trading system will dissolve into blocs. The smaller and weaker countries would be particularly vulnerable in such a world - where rules are written by the powerful, and where even the pretence that all countries are equal would be discarded.

Half a year after the failure of Cancun, another attempt is being made to move the Doha Development Agenda forward. Let it not be a labour of Sisyphus. The key to success is greater political will by developed countries to remove trade-distorting subsidies and open markets to developing countries. Developing countries should play their part too but without full reciprocity being insisted of them.

*******