New WTO head set to hail from global south (The Guardian)
Senior Fellow Kimberley Ann Elliott is quoted in The Guardian on the future head of the World Trade Organization.
Although the race to replace the incumbent, Pascal Lamy, is ongoing, the two candidates who remain in the running after the latest round of elimination are: Roberto Azevêdo (pdf), from Brazil, and Herminio Blanco(pdf), from Mexico.
The nationalities of the finalists represent "an evolution of the changing face of the [WTO] membership", says Kimberly Elliott, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington.
"Moving from the old [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] to the WTO, there was a big increase in developing country membership," Elliott says. "So I think partly it's just a recognition that the membership is broader and that all the members need to feel they have a stake in the organisation."
While the director general spot is not reserved for any particular country or region, trade officials in Geneva "seem to be trying to put in place some sort of a [geographical] rotation system", says Elliot. "At the WTO, whatever we say about how we would like to see a merit-based process, it is very political."
When the selection process got under way in December, trade observers speculated that it was the "turn" of either Latin America or Africa, two regions that had never been represented in the post. The two sub-Saharan African candidates, Alan Kyerematen, of Ghana, and Amina Mohamed, of Kenya, were eliminated in the first round this month.
"That tilted it more toward the Latins," says Elliott, adding that an African candidate is likely to be chosen as the head of another international trade body, the UN conference on trade and development (Unctad), later this year.
