The Archbishop of Cape Town Most Rev Njongonkulu Ndungane

Geneva—The World Trade Organization must gain a human face and become more just, equitable and transparent, South African Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane told the Geneva-based global regulatory body for international commerce on Wednesday.

“The greatest institutional challenge to the WTO, as with most of our international organizations, is to put people first,” said Ndungane, whose predecessor at the head of the Anglican church in South Africa was Nobel Peace Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

“But,” he asked, “does the international trading system work as well as it could, as well as it ought, in meeting these aims?”

Ndungane, the archbishop of Cape Town, was addressing a symposium held yearly at the WTO in a building normally frequented by trade ministers and deal-breaking envoys.

He represented the Trade for People Campaign of the Geneva-based Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance, a group supported by among others the World Council of Churches, the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic group, Franciscans International.

“A system of global apartheid is being formed by the current world economic order,” said Ndungane in an interview with Ecumenical News International prior to the symposium. He explained that during the era of apartheid in South Africa the world united against the racist system because it was jarring for humanity.

“What is now jarring is poverty, hunger, disease and injustice,” which he said was manifested in a set of rules for trading that favoured rich nations at a time when there was both unprecedented growth and also spiralling poverty in the world.

Other speakers on the panel were Kim Hyun-chong, the South Korean minister for trade, Peter Sutherland, an Irish former director general of GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs) and the WTO, who is chairman of corporate giants British Petroleum and Goldman Sachs. Renato Ruggiero, another former WTO director-general, was also to speak.

In his address, Ndungane noted as an example of inequality that in developed countries the HIV virus was largely controllable, “but it is an unnecessary death sentence in poorer parts of the world”. Two-thirds of those infected live in sub-Saharan Africa, most without money for drugs or in countries without the infrastructure to deliver them. “In my own country, South Africa, close to a thousand people die daily of AIDS. Globally, 3 million will die this year,” asserted Ndungane. “This is equivalent to 9/11, three times every single day - such is the terrorism of poverty.”

The WTO had reacted to the pandemic - but like so many other global players, action had been “too slow, too limited, too half-hearted”, he noted.

“Intellectual property protection provisions which, finally, have been loosened to allow cheaper medicines, still have limited flexibility,” the Cape Town archbishop said. “Trade could play a far more effective part of our response, to this and other human needs.”