Marcos Chagas
Reporter - Agência Brasil

Brasília – Brazilian government will not dispute the decision of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Council to eliminate the candidacy of Brazilian Ambassador Luiz Felipe Seixas Corrêa for Director-General of the Organization.

The Minister of Foreign Relations, Celso Amorim, said that, although Brazilian government has doubts about the criteria employed by WTO to gather Member States’ preferences, it will not do anything. "We must understand reality. It is set this way and we must keep fighting for our objectives," exclaimed the chancellor Friday (15).

Candidates’ selection is based on a list of preferences presented by the organization’s Member States. The candidate considered the least capable of obtaining consensus is eliminated.

Amorim criticized "the lack of transparency" of the selection process, but did not question the confidentiality of the votes. The Minister criticized the fact that the council did not release voting numbers. "One thing is the confidentiality, not to disclose who voted on who, which is natural. Another, is not to disclose the numbers. How can I know exactly if each preference was really checked, or if they opted for an average? I don’t know."

In the international commerce arena, Celso Amorim affirmed that Brazil will keep focused on improving the WTO’s conditions and norms. From now on, Brazilian government will evaluate elections circumstances and decide which candidate to support.

Furthermore, the chancellor stated that, at WTO, Brazil will work on strengthening multilateral trading and on making sure that the Doha Round be concluded. In particular, said jAmorim, Brazilian government will prioritize full agricultural trading integration in multilateral norms, especially the elimination of subsidies and other forms of protectionism.

WTO’s Director-General position is being disputed now by Uruguayan diplomat Carlos Pérez del Castillo, European Union ex-commissioner, Pascal Lamy, and by the Mauritius Minister of Foreign Relations and Trading, Jaya Krishna Cuttaree.

Translation: Andréa Alves