GENEVA --- September 25, 2012 --- HE Dr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Panel to Identify 21st Century Trade Challenges, took part in a number of significant meetings and activities the Organization is holding for five days in Geneva.
HE Abu-Ghazaleh took part in the second meeting of the WTO Panel to continue discussions of the challenges and future of the global trade and to find solutions. The Panel’s members submitted their suggestions and visions including setting strategies based on the global changes mainly in terms of the global economic crisis.
Abu-Ghazaleh pointed out that his suggestions contained the Arab points of view expressing his pride and honor for the confidence of the heads of Arab delegations for representing them in his personal capacity, stating that HE Dr. Abdel Aziz bin Shafi Al Otaibi, representative of KSA to the WTO and Coordinator of the Arab Group arranged for a meeting that gathered ambassadors of the Arab countries to the WTO at the permanent headquarters of the League of Arab States to discuss and follow up in details topics related to Arabs’ points of view. He also took part in a joint meeting with government negotiators. 
Moreover, HE Abu-Ghazaleh addressed the open session of the WTO Public Forum which was chaired by WTO Director General Mr. Pascal Lamy with the attendance of over 1,500 participants from civil society, universities, businesses and governments.
Lamy, in welcoming participants said: “While multilateralism is struggling in almost all spheres of global co-operation, I stand here before you with some optimism. We are after all gathered in the “house of trade”. An international house that rose out of the ashes of two World Wars and which took some 60 years to create.”
He continued, “The WTO, in many ways, is one of the most successful examples of rules-based multilateralism at work. Its capacity to administer and enforce the global trade rules, including in the present crisis, is widely recognized as a major success in international co-operation. But our members’ difficulties to agree to update our rule book also demonstrate that the WTO is not immune to the geo-economic and geo-political transformations of our time. The WTO is both an organization and an institution. And I dare say that it is in a better shape as a member-driving institution than as a member-driven organization.”
Lamy addressed the attendees: “You will also meet with the ’WTO Panel on Defining the Future of Trade’ that I have established to advise me on the profound transformations in the global economy, and the drivers of today and tomorrow’s trade.”
In his keynote speech, Abu-Ghazaleh talked about two main issues from the WTO perspective: the WTO built-in problems and the possible action to walk out the crisis.
Concerning the problems, Abu-Ghazaleh said that they are represented in the restraints and structural limitations represented in the fact that the WTO is a negotiation platform and that the decisions are made through consensus, in addition to the scarcity of resources as a result of the funding model. Other problems are the limitation of the WTO mandate in addition to the restricted capacities of the Organization in the pre-knowledge era or prior to the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) revolution, not to mention as well the absence of the private sector (the traders) and the non-responsiveness to the major global geo-economic changes.
Tackling the required possible action to encounter such problems, Abu-Ghazaleh briefed them into the following: To consider critical mass-type negotiations in cases of negotiations deadlock, the “Single Undertaking Principle” and allow for manageable agenda items, to complete
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