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Message from the Director-General
A world trade system for the benefit of all
Dear visitor, welcome to my website,
I believe that trade opening and reducing trade barriers, has been, is and
will remain, essential to promote growth and development, to improve
standards of living and to tackle poverty reduction. The World Trade
Organization remains the most efficient and most legitimate forum to open and
regulate world trade. The most efficient because it works at the service of
all the participants and because of its modern system to solve trade
disputes. The most legitimate, because it is the fairest system of all, as
all the decisions are taken by all the members, large or small, strong or
weak.
But although the opening up of markets produces benefits to many, it also
creates adjustments costs which we cannot ignore. These adjustments must not
be relegated to the future: they must be an integral part of the opening-up
agenda. This is what I call the “Geneva consensus”: a belief that trade
opening works for development but only if we address the imbalances it
creates between winners and losers, imbalances that are all the more
dangerous the more fragile the economies, societies or countries. This is
the only way to ensure that the opening up of markets will produce real
benefits to all people in their everyday lives.
Pascal Lamy
Director-General
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