"Aid and Trade" - CLA/ACE's Conference Theme

October 2008

"Aid and Trade" - CLA/ACE's Conference Theme
INTER PARES October 2008 issue
By Laura Little and John Siwiec

As the head student chapter, one of our main activities is organizing a conference on a pressing international issue in the Winter Semester. Building on the success of last year’s fourth annual conference “Today’s Needs, Tomorrow’s Consequences: Competing Strategies for Sustainable Development,” this year’s theme will be “Trade and Aid.”
There has been a longstanding debate within the donor community on how to best foster development. With growing concerns about the effectiveness of foreign aid, there has been a growing awareness that trade plays an important role in poverty reduction. The potential impact of trade is massive – for instance, it is estimated that a 1% increase in trade from Africa would be the equivalent of five times the amount of aid the continent currently receives.
Recognition of this potential has led to greater calls for the removal of protective trade barriers that prevent producers in developing countries from accessing foreign markets and sharing in the benefits of international trade. In fact, this was a driving force behind the current round of multilateral trade negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) coined the Doha “Development” Round. A primary goal of the Doha negotiations is to address problems specific to developing countries, most notably the massive subsidies provided by Western governments to their agricultural sectors. The negotiations were first launched in 2001 and were suspended once again this past summer as Member States cannot seem to reach a compromise.
Nonetheless, one of the preliminary successes to come out of Doha has been the WTO’s implementation of its “Aid for Trade” program (AfT). AfT involves scaling up international financial and technical assistance to build trade-related capacity, thereby helping developing countries to increase exports of goods and services, to integrate into the world trading system, and to benefit from liberalized trade and increased market access. The goal of AfT is to ensure that developing countries can harness trade to raise living standards, improve health and education, protect the environment, and alleviate poverty. To achieve this, they often need government investment in both hard and soft infrastructure as well as private investment in productive capacity.
On the other hand, AfT has spurred another debate from those who insist that the WTO is not a development agency; its core functioning is trade liberalization, rulemaking, and dispute settlement. With the growing realities of globalization, is such a position tenable?
The aim of our conference will be to evoke stimulating discussions from differing perspectives paying particular attention to the ways in which AfT intersects directly with the law:
* The development of international legal frameworks at the multilateral, regional, and bilateral levels;
* The need for lawyers with expertise in international trade and development to build the negotiating capacities of developing countries in order to better equip them for international trade negotiations; and
* Means by which AfT initiatives can target “soft infrastructure,” including legislative and regulatory reform in the recipient country, to ensure the effective implementation of new rules governing trade with other countries.

If you are interested in volunteering with the conference planning please contact Laura Little at llitt037@uottawa.ca or John Siwiec at jsiwi027@uottawa.ca.