 Ambassador Roberto Azevedo, Director-General of WTO, it's a great pleasure to have you with us. I'm Peter Drysdale from the Crawford School of Public Policy here at the ANU. Since you've taken up the Director-Generalship of the WTO, there's been significant progress through the Bali Accord last November in Indonesia with settlement on the facilitation agreement. I guess one of the issues that's still outstanding in terms of measuring the extent of that progress is in respect of the implementation of that agreement. It's going to take time however quickly it's implemented to implement because it involves a lot of work across the range of the membership of WTO in improving the processes of delivering goods into national economies, but also there are conditionalities attached to the delivery in terms of the nature of the agreement. How do you judge the likely success with implementation of the Bali agreement now that we've got an accord in principle at least? The implementation I think will be successful although it will take a different implementation time for each member. So the way that the agreement was structured, the developed countries implement all the provisions immediately. So we call them category A commitments, so they all are implemented immediately. The emerging economies and many developing countries are going to implement most of the provisions automatically and immediately as well and they are already notifying the WTO that they intend to do so, so we're going to do that. But for other developing countries and the least developed countries, implementation of the commitments will be put in place gradually. So we have a different kind of commitments which will simply mean that they have an additional period of time to put the commitments in place and there is a third category of commitments which requires not only that they have an additional time, but also that they get technical assistance and capacity building support in order to implement the provisions. We don't know exactly how each of the countries is going to schedule the commitments, how long they're going to take to implement each one of those categories of commitments, but we expect that in a short time we will have all of the WTO implementing the provisions of the trade facilitation agreement which will be a huge gain. Like I have said before, some economists are predicting that when fully implemented the agreement will mean something around $1 trillion of additional boost to the world economy and about 21 million jobs around the globe. So it's going to be very significant. Whatever the Accord itself has given a great boost to the credibility and momentum within the WTO, what do you judge to have been the most significant elements on delivering that on the success with the Bali Accord? It was difficult to re-establish trust. We had a deficit of trust in the negotiations. Members had been negotiating that agreement for a long time, even before the Doha round was launched, they were already talking about trade facilitation. So when some say that was an easy agreement, that was a low-hanging fruit, that is not accurate, in fact that was a very difficult achievement to get. We started by building trust and making sure that members understood that that was for real, that we were really negotiating that. Another very important point was bringing it to the political level. We were for a long time negotiating at the technical level. And if you don't bring it to the level of ambassadors or even senior officials and capitals, the degree of flexibility that you need to close the deal doesn't exist. So that was another very important point. So we brought all this to the political level. And another very important element as well was making the process very transparent and very inclusive. So we put every single delegation around the table. So we had meetings with more than 100 people in the room. And some said it is impossible to negotiate in that format, but it was not. It was painful. The difficulty was low, but we made it because no delegation at the end of the process could claim that they did not know what was being negotiated or that they did not know why a particular word was there. And everybody accepted what was there. They might not have liked it. They might have desired to have a different outcome, but they knew why the outcome was that one. So the inclusiveness and the transparency of the process was also very important. You yourself have said that this is only the beginning. How can the WTO build on the success of Bali and going forward with the multilateral negotiations and in the multilateral framework? There was a suspicion that was growing in Geneva that we could not deliver multilateral outcomes. That suspicion is now gone. We know for a fact that we can negotiate multilaterally. We know for a fact that we can deliver. Now the question is going to be how do we conclude the negotiations that we started in 2001 and never finished? How do we turn the page? And I think that while before, members were very skeptical about the possibility of doing that. Today there is more optimism. There is more trust that if we are really engaged, that if we have the political will to do it, that we will do it. Now it will require a rethinking of things that we had on the table before. It will require a recalibration of ambition in different areas. Some going lower. Others going higher. So we don't know what the balance will be. But it will be significant no matter what. And also by ensuring that negotiations happen in a way that do not require impossible movements on the part of members. So whatever we negotiate, it is going to have to be doable. The Barley Accord is a really interesting settlement in a path breaker for the WTO in a number of ways. One of the ways in which it is a path breaker of course is that it mandates the linking of development assistance to reform and capacity building around a reform agenda. This is a new way forward. In our part of the world we see that as an essential element of making progress with trade liberalization and structural reform and regulatory reform. And one of the ways in which we are taking that forward potentially is through this regional comprehensive economic partnership in East Asia around the ASEAN Plus process. Do you see that modality and the WTO potentially linking to that modality as a way forward in the future in developing the agenda of the WTO in these new circumstances where you've got to link all the elements of negotiation, trade in goods, trade in services and investment to effective negotiation to open markets up? In all these negotiations you need not only the linkage between areas so that you have the trade offs which are necessary to make the deal possible. You also need to bear in mind that some countries are in a position to implement the provisions immediately, others are not. In the past what we did particularly during the GATT years and until the Uruguay round negotiations, the special and differential treatment for developing countries was basically an additional time so it was a phase-in of commitment. Developed countries would implement the provision immediately, developing countries would have an additional time to do it but when the new deadline came they would have to implement whether or not they were ready to do it. Now we in Bali broke new ground in the sense that two things now have to be in place for a developing country to put the agreement in force or a provision of the agreement in force. First it has to have acquired the capacity to do it so if the country doesn't have the means or the capacity to do it it's not required to implement the provision. Second there will be technical assistance given for him to achieve that capacity, to acquire that capacity. Now this is new, we have never done anything like that before and it helped immensely. If we didn't have that structure put in place in Bali I'm pretty sure that we would not have reached the agreement at that point in time so this was absolutely critical. I think it's something that can be emulated in future agreements. It depends on the type of agreement, it depends on the type of commitment, it depends on a number of things but this is clearly a new way something that we may explore in the future and may find it useful to conclude deals in the future. You're in Australia at the time of a G20 trade minister's meeting and the B20 being hosted in Sydney over this couple of days. The G20 hasn't had the trade issues as a central part of its agenda up to this point except in so far as it's given at least rhetorical support to completion of the Doha round and of course committed to the standstill on protection. How do you see the potential for the G20 leaders focusing on global trade regime issues and global trade policy issues in the process through the Australian chair of the G20 in which it's quite clear that the Australian leadership would like to see the trade issues elevated. It's very very auspicious that Australia is chairing the G20 this year because it has clearly put trade back on the table. The trade ministers had met before, the G20 had met before, but they never really went very deep or very far in terms of trade discussions. This is something that I hope will change. It doesn't simply make any sense to be talking about economic development or economic recovery or stability, employment, inflation, exchange rates without talking about trade, it just doesn't make any sense. A big component in all of those areas of the economic activity trade is there in a big way. So it is absolutely critical that we talk about trade, that we try to figure out ways of avoiding protectionism, avoiding trade distortions introduced artificially by governments, that we try to provide disciplines which make investments predictable, that makes economic interaction among countries predictable, that makes trade flows predictable. So it is a critical element of the discussions. I'm very happy that this is happening this time around. To the extent that we can help, the WTO will do its best to contribute to the discussions. We already provide periodic reports about the protectionist measures or restrictive measures that are being introduced by the G20 members. We can do more and I will be available to do that. Thank you very much, Ambassador, and thank you very much for sparing your time to share your thoughts with us here at the ANU. My pleasure. Thank you very much for the opportunity.