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Consultative Board to the Director-General Supachai Panitchpakdi (ed.) (2004): The Future of the WTO - Addressing Institutional Challenges in the New Millennium World Trade Organization, Geneva, 86 pages, available on the Internet: http://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/10anniv_e/10anniv_e.htm#future
At the time when the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) went through a difficult phase in the first half of the 1980s, the then secretary-General ARTHUR DUNKEL asked a group of seven non-governmental experts "to identify the fundamental causes of the problems afflicting the international trading system and to consider how these may be overcome during the remainder of the 1980s". This so-called LEUTWILER Group, named after its chairman, came up with an unanimous 50 page report in early 1985 that included both a diagnosis of the current situation and fifteen recommendations for specific, immediate action to meet the crisis present in the trading system.1 Today, the Group's proposals are regarded as a major input to the Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations (1986-1994) that ultimately gave birth to the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
Twenty years after the LEUTWILER Group issued its report, the multilateral trading system is once again sailing through rough waters: After the golden years following the creation of the WTO, the Organisation lost its innocence in the streets of Seattle in late 1999, when the Third Ministerial Conference ended in a debacle: Instead of launching the expected Millennium Round of multilateral trade negotiations, the starter's signal to rounds of public protest against the WTO was given. Gradually, the spirit of this opposition in the streets entered the political and academic debate where it has translated into more finely-tuned criticism - e.g. on the allegedly overreaching dispute settlement mechanism, or on the portrayed inability of the WTO to establish a more equitable trading system that helps eradicate poverty, just to mention a few examples. And while current negotiations under the Doha Development Round have progressed only slowly in recent years, governments are increasingly focussing their trade policy efforts on bilateral and regional trade deals - despite prayer-wheel style lip-service that is paid to the importance of the multilateral trading system.
This gloomy atmosphere may have induced the current WTO Director-General SUPACHAI PANITCHPAKDI to establish, in June 2003, a Consultative Board on the Future of the Multilateral Trading...