|
South Asia Watch on Trade, Economics and Environment (SAWTEE), Kathmandu, and
Centad jointly organised a three-day training seminar, called ‘Road to Hong Kong',
for South Asia journalists on July 11-13, 2005, in Pokhara, Nepal.
Click here for a full account of the seminar
The
objectives of the training seminar were three-fold: - To take stock
of issues in the context of the forthcoming sixth World Trade Organisation (WTO)
Ministerial Meeting to be held in Hong Kong during December 13-18, 2005.
- To
orient and build the capacity of economic journalists in the region, in the context
of understanding issues under the ambit of the WTO.
- To explore the possibility
of establishing linkages between economic journalists in the region.
Thirty-two
economic journalists from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka participated
in the seminar. Here is a brief account of the proceedings from one of the participating
journalists from India: “Learning about the negotiations that would take
place in the Ministerial required an understanding of the basic premises of the
WTO and the history of the organisation. This input was provided by Ratnakar Adhikari,
director of SAWTEE, who gave a talk on the background of the WTO and the history
of the multilateral trading system. “Then, experts from all over South
Asia gave presentations on specific topics relating to the WTO negotiations coming
up in Hong Kong and their likely impact on South Asia. “To enhance the
learning process, the presentations were interactive and each was followed by
a question-answer session. At the end of the day, the journalists were split into
groups and given topics to make their own presentations to demonstrate their understanding
of the issues. Some of the topics the experts dealt with were: - Agriculture
- Non-agricultural market access
- Trade facilitation
- Trade
and development
- Intellectual property rights
- Dispute settlement
mechanisms of the WTO
“The objective was to increase journalists'
ability to more critically analyse WTO negotiations and agreements, and add to
the public interest dimension of their writings. Happily, the speakers did not
take a strident anti-WTO stand or a blindly pro-liberalisation view. “The
workshop also saw the first stages of setting up a network of economic journalists
working on South Asian WTO issues.”
|
