PESHAWAR, July 21: Speakers at a workshop on 'World Trade Organization Regime and Agriculture' have underlined the need for preparing Pakistan to deal with the challenges posed by the coming trade regimes.

The day-long capacity-building workshop for the electronic and print media was jointly organized by the Peshawar Press Club and the Action aid Pakistan at the press club on Wednesday.

The speakers said the WTO, which came into being on Jan 1, 1995, was an effective and formal alternative to the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (Gatt). They said after the second World War, the US and UK along with 42 other nations gathered at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, on July 1, 1944, to find ways to rehabilitate the sagging Western economies.

During their 22-day discussion, they agreed to form three institutions -- IMF, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (later known as World Bank) and International Trade Organization -- for the purpose.

They said the ITO could not develop into a permanent body like the IMF and the World Bank, however, after the Geneva charter of 1947 it emerged as Gatt and tried to streamline the trade flow on a global level. A number of trade rounds and conferences paved the way for the WTO which took a permanent shape in 1995, they said.

Dr Syed Wajid Pirzada, Resident Director of Roots Pakistan and a member of the Pakistan Agriculture Research Council, Mehnaz Paracha and Rosah Malik of the Actionaid, Islamabad, spoke on history and functions of the WTO, beneficiaries and losers of the trade-related intellectual property rights (Trips), failure of the Cancun accord and status of negotiations on the WTO, different barriers on exports and role of media in educating the stockholders on these issues.

Some of the speakers regretted that the Pakistan government was taking the WTO-related issues too casually which would not prove beneficial for the country in future. The bureaucracy was not sharing any information about the WTO regime with the civil society, they observed.

The speakers said that Pakistan was an agrarian society but the government had done nothing concrete to improve the agriculture sector. The government lacked a lobbying force at the WTO headquarters in Geneva to protect its interests, they added.

Pakistan was enlisted as a developing country, while Bangladesh, which had a good share in the international export market, was enlisted as a least developed country. They observed that it was the duty of the government to side with the developing nations like China, India, Argentine and others on issues which were of common interest and resist the unjust demands of the western powers.