His excellency Ambassador Alvaro Cedeño Molinari is the current Permanent Representative of Costa Rica to the World Trade Organization (WTO). He has graciously accepted to share with the Green Economy blog, the thoughts he expressed at the General Council Meeting of the WTO on October 24 in regards to the future of world trade.
"I wish to start by recalling a fable that my father used to tell me while growing up: a herd of wild rabbits lived in the forest, when one day one of the rabbits yelled out to the rest: the hounds are coming! Almost immediately, another one yelled back: not hounds, they are retrievers! And the first one yelled even louder to repeat: hounds! And the quarrel emerged: Retrievers! Hounds! Retrievers! Very soon, the dogs arrived and ate all the rabbits.
"When I accepted this job I was convinced that the World Trade Organization could have a determinant role to play in transforming the world’s most pressing conflicts. After almost three years my conviction has only grown. But delivery is not a matter of faith but a matter of effective action.
"A quick look at the SDGs contained in Agenda 2030 reveals that we are all developing countries. We are in this together and it is our mission to ensure that all of us reach those goals within the mandated timeframe. I also see gigantic opportunities in that Agenda to make inefficiencies efficient and to enlarge the pie for all of us to cut a larger slice to take back home. But first we must be effective at enlarging the pie. This will certainly require the WTO to do its part.
"Given the environmental constraints of the industry, fisheries subsidies are a crucial problem that requires effective solutions. To be effective, we will need to make technical efforts and collect political leadership from all WTO members. This is a multilateral goal; therefore it is a multilateral task that must be completed multilaterally within a fast approaching deadline. Do keep in mind that we are less than 800 days away from the year 2020.
"About e-commerce, I continue paying attention to my colleagues and I hear pertinent questions being asked: how to ensure e-commerce does not widen the digital divide? How to promote greater investment on infrastructure for connectivity? How to guarantee that the value proposition of the digital economy is truly inclusive and sustainable? How to specifically stimulate e-commerce for LDCs? How do we develop skills and technical assistance for those who need them most to leapfrog forward?
"I wish to express that e-commerce is not an “us versus them” issue, but an “us versus our future” issue. Empathy, therefore, must be at the core of our efforts. Empathy among ourselves in this room and empathy between us and those who will come in the future, including the ones that have not yet been born that we also care about. When I speak to colleagues whose nations have electricity coverage that reach less than 20% of their population, I can’t help but realize that we are consistently failing to see the bigger picture. In order to see the bigger picture we will require a conscious effort of creativity, of imagination, of design and strategic thinking. Both empathy and creativity belong into my preferred definition of peace, understood as the ability to transform conflicts empathically and creatively. Of course we can. These traits are inherent to our human nature. The critical question is whether we want to do it or not. It does not convince me to hear arguments like “there is no convergence”, or “we must think about post-MC11”, or the belief that a work program from twenty years ago contains all necessary elements to reap the low hanging fruits that the digital economy is producing before our eyes. What I hear instead is “I don’t want to try” or “I don’t want to do it”.
UN Conference on Trade and Development eCommerce Week Conference 2017
"We are not looking for the easy way out. We are looking for the challenging way forward that will create the most value for the majority of citizens of the world represented in this House. Nothing extraordinary has ever come out of a comfort zone. So we either voluntarily step out of our comfort zones in search of value, or we sit down and wait for the fast changing circumstances to involuntarily kick us out of these comfort zones. The decision is ours. Do keep in mind that at the pace of retail e-commerce acceleration, it has grown 35% globally since the group of Friends of E-commerce for Development was launched last year. In an ideal world, we would have all taken a slice of the pie one third larger than 18 months ago. Clearly, this has not been the case. Between now and MC12 e-commerce is expected to grown an additional 50% and if we do nothing, we cannot expect different results than the present ones.
"At a similar pace, trade has been mutating as of late. We can no longer ignore the carbon footprint that global value chains and trade logistics have on the world’s ecosystems. The goal of the World Trade Organization is to expand the benefits of trade and to facilitate those benefits to reach all communities worldwide. In this capacity we have a role to play by using rules, best endeavors, transparency, Trade Policy Reviews and other existing vehicles or those we consider worth creating anew, to transform the kind of trade that is directly linked to the environment and highly threatened by climate change, such as fisheries, forestry, agriculture, energy generation, the provision of services such as logistics and transportation, high technology manufacturing, and, in general, industrial manufacturing of all sorts.
"We also understand that the digital economy emerges at a juncture in which it is most needed. E-commerce is perhaps the most efficient way ever created to allocate natural resources for billions of producers and consumers to meet in the marketplace, having a substantial reduction in carbon emissions. This is disruptive in many positive ways but will transform many industries we recognize today, such as marketing, one-size-fits-all manufacturing, customs and tax collection, payment methods and banking in general, connectivity, consumption and waste management, among others.
"E-commerce is only a thin slice of what the digital economy entails. Three-dimensional printing will disrupt intellectual property, logistics services, customs and tax collection even further. Today we can print a pair of shoes, a metal component of an airplane turbine, a house and even some kinds of high-protein food for animal and human consumption. The solar energy revolution is transforming us very quickly into prosumers, or producers of the energy we consume, allowing some of us to become micro-entrepreneurs in the energy business selling electricity back to the grid. Biotechnology is changing the way we conceive agricultural production and offers the promise for local, organic, and highly advanced production. Let me remind you all that these disruptions do not lie in the future; they are all happening today. What will the WTO do about it?
"That being said, trade and development must be seen today through the digital and environment lenses in order to constrain our innovation and guide our leadership. The biggest risk I can think of for the WTO is that it loses contact with reality therefore rendering it unfit to seek global solutions for humankind.
"Director General, I believe the greatest value of human interaction comes from diversity and if we want to continue creating shared value from the WTO to the world we must enrich our thinking, our behavior and our attitudes through the ideas of others, within and without these walls.
"Even though I understand that the most unique function of the WTO is the creation of new trade rules and the administration of existing ones, I cannot conclude but quoting Emile Durkheim, who reminds us that when values are sufficient, norms are unnecessary; and when values are insufficient, norms are ineffective.
"Thank you."
