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“This time around things are totally different,” he says. “I pride myself on the emergence of the active role of all countries participating in the round. You put your money on the table, you see each other’s position and try to work from that.”

The EU’s offer to phase out agricultural export subsidies was important, he says.

“I think it has been most helpful for Europe to come forth with this commitment. I think that is putting part of your money on the table.

“I would encourage people to show the colour of their money as early as possible and challenge the others to come up (with theirs) and tell them: I am doing this in good faith.

“I want openness and good faith in the negotiations. Because otherwise we will have this back and forth kind of argument all the time. This will be the brinkmanship until the end of the round — and it will not really help us in clinching the deal in time.”

The Doha Round is being pushed against a backdrop in which hostility to globalisation and free trade has faded over the past few years. There are fewer demonstrations by anti-capitalist groups than five years ago. In any case, Dr Supachai believes that the process of globalisation is unstoppable: “I always think the process of globalisation is irreversible. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have setbacks. We know that it is driven mainly by technology. But globalisation will have setbacks, particularly when you have incoherent policies or rigidities in your policies.”

He concedes that there will be winners and losers, but he is confident that, overall, the world will be better off. He says that a key to making trade work is to follow Asian nations in ensuring that there is government help for people disrupted by liberalisation.

“It would be harnessed so that you can make trade serve your purpose, enhancing competitiveness and earning value-added, based upon the capacity and the skill that you have.”

He highlights some specialised sectors that have gained from opening up trade. The flower industry in Kenya is, he says, “a major gainer — and it’s mainly because the market has opened up for everyone”. Tomato growers in Mexico have benefited from America’s vast appetite for ketchup, he says.

Beyond the present round, Dr Supachai is more concerned over the potential obstacles to liberalisation from a slew of complex ethical and political issues with which free trade has become intertwined.

From resistance to genetically modified food to animal welfare, from child labour to the environment and climate change, the liberalisation process is becoming bound up by complex questions threatening to make it unworkable.

The Director-General’s view is that many of these issues are legitimate areas of concern and anxiety in various societies. But he is emphatic that many of them cannot be handled within the remit of the WTO.

The imminent end of Dr Supachai’s term at the WTO adds to an upheaval at the very top of the trade effort. Mr Zoellick is about to be replaced and Mr Mandelson is still new, having taken the reins from the highly respected Pascal Lamy in Brussels.

Dr Supachai is sanguine about the implications. “Well, I am comforted by the belief that although personalities are important, personalities are always always backed up by a bureaucracy. And I am sure that the set-up of the US leadership in the area of trade, as well as in the European Union, is a set-up which is pro trade.

The key to progress, he says, is that everybody in the negotiations should be plain-dealing, honest brokers. “It’s good-faith negotiations. I don’t think we should have cards that we keep behind our backs.”

A NEW era of “ethically driven” decision-making may be opening up but the World Trade Organisation must keep a tight rein on its role in such issues, Supachai Panitchpakdi says.

The Director-General of the WTO accepts, for example, that animal welfare is of great importance to many people in the West, but says: “If this is brought to the areas of trade, then we would deal with things that the WTO would not be equipped at the moment to deal with. I don’t think at the moment we are ready to do so.”

He says that environmental issues must not become interlinked with trade. He is concerned that there are instances where these issues can be used as excuses to erect protectionist “non-tariff” barriers to trade under the guise of good intentions. Instead, he suggests the United Nations environmental programme becomes “a full-fledged organisation to take care of the environment, to take away the hot issue from us. We just do trade. When I talk about expansion of the areas of responsibility of this organisation, I raise concern that we will go into areas like this. It demands a different kind of expertise that we don’t have.”

Dr Supachai is encouraged that China is embarking successfully on the second phase of its economic liberalisation. “That will mean a larger presence of foreign entities in their economy. That will be the decisive moment,” he says. He says that China has strengthened its intellectual property laws but that more work is needed to enforce measures outside Beijing.

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