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African states set up WTO pressure forum

CAIRO: Africa's three largest economies announced on Sunday the creation of a new grouping that aims to increase developing nations' weight in world trade talks.

Ministers of trade and economy from Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa, meeting in Cairo, said the new bloc would serve Africa but was open to all developing countries.

"Our commitment is to make sure that Africa is lifted into a greater presence on the world trade scene," Egyptian Economy Minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali told a joint news conference with Nigerian Commerce Minister Mustapha Bello and South African Trade and Industry Minister Alec Erwin.

"But the origin of our gathering is more to get greater weight to developing countries in the multilateral trading system. It is not limited to African countries," Ghali added.

The proposal was first suggested at ministerial level talks on a new world trade pact that collapsed amid riots and recriminations in the U.S. city of Seattle last December.

"We have realised that one of the reasons why Seattle did not succeed was problems in the internal governing of the WTO, how the decision-making process works in the WTO and its exclusionary feature," Ghali said.

Erwin previously suggested forming a southern hemisphere power bloc to present a united developing nation front during the next round of World Trade Organisation talks on a new global pact on tariff cuts, due to start later this year.

The ministers repeatedly insisted that the aim of their grouping was to exchange views and not to coordinate demands.

"What we seek today is just to convey what our views are," Erwin said. "It is very useful to...try to create a degree of concert. We are not going to replace other groupings like G-77. That's why we choose it to be very loose."

Ghali said: "We do not have lists of demands nor are we going to issue lists of demands."

India and Brazil were expected at Sunday's meeting, but their representatives could not show up for domestic reasons, Ghali said.

India and Egypt have expressed interest in working together in the areas of commodities and textiles and issues related to anti-dumping.

In Cape Town, Brazilian Foreign Minister Luiz Lampeira said on Wednesday the forum of the larger developing nations would discuss "strategies to carry on with the WTO work and to push the agenda that does interest us in the developing world."-Reuters