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Africa: UN Secretary-General Calls for Free Trade On Global Market
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Ghanaian Chronicle (Accra)
22 April 2008
Posted to the web 22 April 2008
Sebastian R. Freiku
Kumasi
The Secretary-General of United Nations, Mr. Ban Ki-moon has stressed the need for more free trade in the global economy to boost the economies of poor countries.
He believes this has the tendency of lifting those countries from poverty.
Mr. Ki-moon made this statement at the opening ceremony of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTADXII) summit in Accra, in connection with soaring food prices, climate change and the lag in achieving development goals, which was marring the efforts of poor countries to grow.
According to him, trade and economic development are the main priorities to make countries enrich.
For this reason, he noted that it was thus imperative for poor countries to be given the opportunity to grow their economies.
"Remember, the forces that spread prosperity so widely in recent decades are the same forces that will carry us into the future, and that is economic development", he said.
For him, the first job of any Government was to feed its people.
He therefore stressed the need for governments to device methods to ensure that there were no food shortages in their economies.
"International grain markets must remain open and functioning normally. Beggar-thy-neighbour food wars cannot, in the long run, help anyone", he stressed.
In order to make global trade serve development, particularly the needs of the "bottom billion", he noted that equitable trade regimes must be negotiated in the Doha Round of trade talks; whilst the wealthiest countries needed to rethink their agricultural subsidies and resource-rich countries which needed assistance to gain more from the export of their raw material.
The Secretary-General said there was the need for fresh thinking and approaches towards integrating the poor countries into world prosperity adding that, it was in this direction that delegates had gathered in Accra.
"Nowhere is the global challenge of economic disenfranchisement more acute than in Africa", he noted.
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To this effect, he noted that the deal with the food crisis in the long-term agricultural production must be increased; emphasizing that there was no reason why Africa could not experience a "green revolution" if assistance and markets were shaped towards that end.
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