By Robert Evans
BANGKOK, Feb 13 (Reuters) - World Trade Organisation chief Mike Moore suggested on Sunday the big powers should agree to open their markets wide to goods from the poorest if they wanted to win backing for a new round of global trade talks.
Speaking to ministers from the 48 least-developed countries (LDCs) at the Bangkok conference of the U.N. trade and development agency UNCTAD, Moore said he was engaged in a major effort to get action to help them.
"If some people want a new round, let's have something of substance now as a down-payment," the former New Zealand prime minister declared.
The LDCs, mostly in Africa and Asia, are pushing for duty- and quota-free access for all their products to richer parts of the world, especially the United States and the 15-member European Union, to help them out of growing poverty.
In a report issued in Bangkok on Sunday, UNCTAD said the 48, who account for 13 percent of the world's population, had become increasingly marginalised during the 1990s, losing 40 percent of the already tiny share of global exports they had in 1980.
POVERTY AND SOCIAL EXCLUSION
The past decade, UNCTAD Secretary-General Rubens Ricupero said in the report, had been for LDCs one of "increasing marginalisation, inequality, poverty and social exclusion. ...
"The violence and social tensions which afflict several LDCs are caused, in part at least, by increasing deprivation and in equality," the UNCTAD chief asserted.
Moore and Ricupero, a one-time Brazilian finance minister and trade negotiator, have both championed a so-called "LDC initiative" on market access.
But although the United States, the EU and Japan have said they are ready to allow "essentially all" LDC goods into their markets duty free, they make clear they want to keep controls on what they call "sensitive products."
LDCs say these include most of their key exports in a total which accounts for only 0.5 percent of all world trade.
Bangladesh Commerce Minister Abdul Jalil, who was chairing the Sunday meeting, told Reuters easier export to the West of his country's textile products was vital to keep up the momentum of social change and the advancement of women.
And Ethiopia's Trade and Industry Minister Kassahun Awale complained that the EU in particular was showing no sign of dropping barriers to sugar, rum, beef and bananas from developing countries with whom it had no special agreements.
SOME COMFORT FOR LDCs
Moore had some words of comfort on that score for the LDCs. He said they were "not knocking on a totally closed door" as far as major trading powers were concerned.
"There are colleagues in the North who want to do something," he told the ministers.
"Very active negotiations are under way on trying to produce an (LDC) package," he said. "The phones are working non-stop right now ... We are pushing very hard to get this together."
But he also appealed to LDCs to recognise what he said was the importance of launching a new round -- a project which collapsed at a WTO ministers meeting in Seattle in December amid widespread disagreement between its 135 member states.
"My duty to you is to get a new round going," Moore said.
Human rights groups and left-wing activists have been protesting on the fringes of the summit against what they see as the evils of free trade and its impact on poor countries.:
