[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
[December 1, 1999]
[Pages 2189-2194]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a World Trade Organization Luncheon in Seattle
December 1, 1999

    Thank you very much. Ambassador Barshefsky, thank you for your remarks and your work. Ladies and 
gentlemen, we have a very large delegation from our administration here 
today, and I hope it's evidence to you of our seriousness of purpose. I 
thank the Commerce Secretary, Bill Daley; 
the Agriculture Secretary, Dan Glickman; our 
SBA Administrator, Aida Alvarez, my National 
Economic Councilor, Gene Sperling; Ambassador 
Esserman; and my Chief of Staff, John 
Podesta, all of whom are here, and I thank 
them.
    I want to say that I agree that Mike Moore is 
the ideal person to head the WTO, because he has a sense of humor, and 
boy, do we need it right now. [Laughter] Did you see the gentleman 
holding up the big white napkin here before we started? He was doing 
that to get the light for the television cameras. But he was standing 
here holding the napkin, and Mike whispered to me, he said, ``Well, 
after yesterday, that could be the flag of the WTO.'' [Laughter] We'll 
have rolling laughter as the translation gets through here.
    Let me begin by saying welcome to the United States and to one of 
our most wonderful cities. We are honored to have you here on a very 
important mission. Today I want to talk a little bit about the work that 
we're all here to do: launching a new WTO round for a new century, a new 
type of round that I hope will be about jobs, development, and broadly 
shared prosperity and about improving the quality of life, as well as 
the quality of work around the world, an expanded system of rule-based 
trade that keeps pace with the changing global economy and the changing 
global society.
    Let me begin by saying that 7 years ago when I had the honor to 
become President of the United States, I sat down alone and sort of made 
a list of the things that I hoped could be done to create the kind of 
world that I wanted our children to live in, in the new century, a world 
where the interests of the United States I thought were quite clear: in 
peace and stability; in democracy and prosperity.
    To achieve that kind of world, I thought it was very important that 
the United States support the increasing unity of Europe and the

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expansion of the European Union; that we support the expansion of NATO 
and its partnership with what are now more than two dozen countries, 
including Russia and Ukraine; that we support the integration of China, 
Russia, and the Indian subcontinent, in particular, into the large 
political and economic flows of our time; that we stand against the 
ethnic and religious conflicts that were still consuming the Middle East 
and Northern Ireland, then Bosnia and later Kosovo; that we do what we 
could to help people all over the world to deal with such things, 
including the tribal wars in Africa.
    And I thought it was important that we give people mechanisms by 
which they could work toward a shared prosperity, which is why we wanted 
to finish the last WTO round; why we are working hard with our friends 
in Europe on a Stability Pact for the Balkans; why we know economics 
must be a big part of the Middle East peace process; why we have an 
Asian-Pacific economic forum where the leaders meet; why we've had two 
Summits of the Americas with our friends in Latin America; why we're 
trying to pass the Africa and Caribbean Basin trade initiatives; and why 
I believe it is imperative that we here succeed in launching a new trade 
round that can command broad support among ordinary citizens in all our 
countries and take us where we want to go.
    There are negative forces I have tried to combat, in addition to the 
forces of hatred based on ethnic or religious difference: the 
terrorists, the problems of disease and poverty, which I hope that the 
large debt relief initiative that we are pushing will help to alleviate.
    But in the end, all of these changes in my view will only give us 
the world we want, where the poorest countries have children that can at 
least live through childhood and where the boys as well as the girls can 
go to school and then have a chance to make a decent living; where 
countries with governance problems can work through them; where wealthy 
countries can continue to prosper but do so in a way that is more 
responsible to helping those who still have a long way to go 
economically; and where, together, we can meet our common 
responsibilities to human needs, to the environment, to the cause of 
world peace. We will not get that done unless we can prove, for all of 
our domestic political difficulties and all of our honest differences, 
we still believe that we can have an interdependent global economy that 
runs alongside our interdependent international information society.
    And we are called upon here to meet against a background of a lot of 
people coming here to protest. Some of them, I think, have a short 
memory, or maybe no memory, of what life was like in most of your 
countries not so very long ago. So let me say again, I condemn the small 
number who were violent and who tried to prevent you from meeting.
    But I'm glad the others showed up, because they represent millions 
of people who are now asking questions about whether this enterprise in 
fact will take us all where we want to go. And we ought to welcome their 
questions and be prepared to give an answer, because if we cannot create 
an interconnected global economy that is increasing prosperity and 
genuine opportunity for people everywhere, then all of our political 
initiatives are going to be less successful. So I ask you to think about 
that.
    When I hear the voices outside the meeting rooms, I disagree with a 
lot of what they say, but I'm still glad they're here. Why? Because 
their voices now count in this debate. For 50 years--one of the reasons 
I said we needed a leader like Mr. Moore, with a 
sense of humor, because for 50 years global trade, even though there 
were always conflicts--you know, the United States and Japan, they're 
our great friends and allies; we're always arguing about something. But 
to be fair, it was a conflict that operated within a fairly narrow band. 
For 50 years, trade decisions were largely the province of trade 
ministers, heads of government, and business interests. But now, what 
all those people in the street tell us is that they would also like to 
be heard. And they're not so sure that this deal is working for them.
    Some of them say, well--and by the way, they're kind of like we are; 
a lot of them are in conflict with each other, right? Because a lot of 
them say, ``Well, this is not a good thing for the developing countries. 
They haven't benefited as much as they should have, while the wealthy 
countries have grown wealthier in this information society.'' Others 
say, ``Well, even if you're growing the economy, you're hurting the 
environment.'' And still others say, ``Well, companies may be getting 
rich in some of these poorer countries, but actual working, laboring 
people are not doing so well.'' And others have other various and sundry 
criticisms of what we have done.

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    I would like to say, first of all, I think we need to do a better 
job of making the basic case. No one in this room can seriously argue 
that the world would have been a better place today if our forebears 
over the last 50 years had not done their work to bring us closer 
together. Whatever the problems that exist in whatever countries 
represented here, whatever the legitimacy of any of the criticism 
against us, this is a stronger, more prosperous world because we have 
worked to expand the frontiers of cooperation and reduce the barriers to 
trade among people. And we need to reiterate our conviction that that is 
true. If we were all out here going on our own, we would not be as well 
off in the world as we are.
    Secondly, at the end of the cold war, I am sure everyone in this 
room has been struck by the cruel irony that in this most modern of 
ages, when the Internet tells us everything, as Mr. Moore said, when we 
are solving all the problems of the human gene, and we will soon know 
what's in the black holes in the universe, it is truly ironic that the 
biggest problems of human society are the oldest ones, those rooted in 
our fear of those who are different from us: different races, different 
ethnic groups, different tribes, different religions, all over the 
world, people consumed by differences.
    When people are working together for common prosperity in a rule-
based system, they have big incentives to lay the differences down and 
join hands to work together. So if we just make those two points to our 
critics, I think it's very important: Number one, the world is a better 
place than it would have been, had we not had the last 50 years of 
increasing economic cooperation for trade and investment; and number 
two, the world of the future will be a safer place if we continue to 
work together in a rule-based system that offers enormous incentives for 
people to find ways to cooperate and to give up their old hatreds and 
their impulses to violence and war.
    Now having said that, we now have to say: What next? I think we have 
to acknowledge a responsibility, particularly those of us in the 
wealthier countries, to make sure that we are working harder to see that 
the benefits of the global economy are more widely shared among and 
within countries, that it truly works for ordinary people who are doing 
the work for the rest of us. I think we also have to make sure that the 
rules make sense and that we're continuing to make progress, 
notwithstanding the domestic political difficulties that every country 
will face. We all benefit when the rules are clear and fair. I think 
that means we have to cut tariffs further on manufactured goods and set 
equally ambitious goals for services. I think we should extend our 
moratorium on E-commerce. I think we should treat agriculture as we 
treat other sectors of the economy.
    But we all have domestic political constraints. Everybody knows 
that. I think we have to leave this luncheon saying, in spite of that, 
we're going to find some way to keep moving forward because the world 
will be a better place, and the world will be a safer place.
    Now, let me offer a few observations of what I hope will be done. 
First, I think we have to do more to ensure that the least developed 
countries have greater access to global markets and the technical 
assistance to make the most of it.
    Director-General Moore has dedicated himself 
and this organization to extending the benefits of trade to the least 
developed countries, and I thank you for that, sir. Here in Seattle, 32 
developing nations are moving toward admission to the WTO. EU President 
Prodi and I have discussed this whole issue, 
and I have assured him, and I assure you, that the United States is 
committed to a comprehensive program to help the poorest nations become 
full partners in the world trading system. This initiative, which we are 
working on with the EU, Japan, and Canada, would enhance market access 
for products from the least developed countries consistent with our GSP 
preference access program and our Africa and Caribbean Basin 
initiatives, which, I am glad to report, are making good progress 
through the United States Congress.
    Building on our recent collaboration with Senegal, Lesotho, Zambia, 
Bangladesh, and Nigeria, we would also intensify our efforts to help 
developing countries build the domestic institutions they need to make 
the most of trade opportunities and to implement WTO obligations. This 
afternoon I will meet with heads of international organizations that 
provide trade-related technical assistance and ask them to help in this 
effort.
    And I will say this. I do believe, after the Uruguay round, when we 
set up this system, that we did not pay enough attention to the internal 
capacity-building in the developing nations that is necessary to really 
play a part in

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the global economy. And I am prepared to do my part to rectify that 
omission.
    We also must help these countries avert the health and pollution 
costs of the industrial age. We have to help them use clean technologies 
that improve the economy, the environment, and health care at the same 
time. And I will just give one example.
    Today is World AIDS Day, and today the USTR--our Trade 
Representative--and the Department of Health and Human Services are 
announcing that they are committed to working together to make sure that 
our intellectual property policy is flexible enough to respond to 
legitimate public health crises.
    Intellectual property protections are very important to a modern 
economy, but when HIV and AIDS epidemics are involved and like serious 
health care crises, the United States will henceforward implement its 
health care and trade policies in a manner that ensures that people in 
the poorest countries won't have to go without medicine they so 
desperately need. I hope this will help South Africa and many other 
countries that we are committed to support in this regard.
    More generally, this new round should promote sustainable 
development in places where hunger and poverty still stoke despair. We 
know countries that have opened their economies to the world have also 
opened the doors to opportunity and hope for their own people. Where 
barriers have fallen, by and large, living standards have risen, and 
democratic institutions have become stronger. We have to spread that 
more broadly.
    So secondly, I want to say what I said at the WTO in Geneva last 
year. I think it is imperative that the WTO become more open and 
accessible. While other international organizations have sought and not 
shied from public participation--when that has happened, public support 
has grown. If the WTO expects to have public support grow for our 
endeavors, the public must see and hear and in a very real sense 
actually join in the deliberations. That's the only way they can know 
the process is fair and know their concerns were at least considered.
    We've made progress since I issued this challenge in Geneva last 
year, but I believe there's more work to be done from opening the 
hearing room doors to inviting in a more formal fashion public comment 
on trade disputes.
    Now look, let me just say, I know there's a lot of controversy about 
this. And as all of you know, I'm about to enter the last year of my 
Presidency. I will not be around to deal with the aftermath. But I'm 
telling you, I've been in this business a long time, and in the end, we 
all serve and function at the sufferance of the people, either with 
their active support or their silent acquiescence. What they are telling 
us in the streets here is, this was an issue we used to be silent on. 
We're not going to be silent on it anymore. We haven't necessarily given 
up on trade, but we want to be heard.
    The sooner the WTO opens up the process and lets people representing 
those who are outside in, the sooner we will see fewer demonstrations, 
more constructive debate, and a broader level of support in every 
country for the direction that every single person in this room knows 
that we ought to be taking into the 21st century. So we can do it a 
little bit now and a little bit later. We can drag our feet, or we can 
run through an open door. But my preference is to open the meetings, 
open the records, and let people file their opinions.
    No one, no sensible person expects to win every argument, and no one 
ever does. But in a free society, people want to be heard, and human 
dignity and political reality demand it today.
    Third, as I have said repeatedly, I believe the WTO must make sure 
that open trade does indeed lift living standards, respects core labor 
standards that are essential not only to worker rights but to human 
rights. That's why this year the United States has proposed that the WTO 
create a working group on trade and labor. To deny the importance of 
these issues in a global economy is to deny the dignity of work, the 
belief that honest labor fairly compensated gives meaning and structure 
to our lives. I hope we can affirm these values at this meeting.
    I am pleased that tomorrow I will sign the ILO convention to 
eliminate the worst forms of child labor. And I thank the United States 
Senate on a bipartisan basis for supporting us in this. I believe the 
WTO should collaborate more closely with the ILO, which has worked hard 
to protect human rights, to ban child labor. I hope you will do this.
    Let me say in all candor, I am well aware that a lot of the nations 
that we most hope to support, the developing nations of the world, have 
reservations when the United States says

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we support bringing labor concerns into our trade debate. And I freely 
acknowledge that, if we had a certain kind of rule, then protectionists 
in wealthy countries could use things like wage differentials to keep 
poorer countries down, to say, ``Okay, you opened your markets to us. 
Now we'll sell to you. But you're selling to us, and we want to keep you 
down, so we'll say you're not paying your people enough.''
    The answer to that is not to avoid this labor issue, not when 
there's still child labor all over the world, not when there are still 
oppressive labor practices all over the world, not when there is still 
evidence in countries that ordinary people are not benefiting from this. 
The answer is not to just throw away the issue. The answer is to write 
the rules in such a way that people in our position, the wealthier 
countries, can't do that, can't use this as an instrument of 
protectionism. We can find a way to do this.
    But there is a sense of solidarity all over the world, among 
ordinary people who get up every day, will never be able to come to a 
luncheon like this, do their work, raise their children, pay their 
taxes, form the backbone of every nation represented here. They deserve 
basic, fundamental decency, and the progress of global trade should 
reflect, also, in their own lives. I do not want the United States, or 
any other country, now or later, to be able to use this as a shield for 
protectionism. But to pretend that it is not a legitimate issue in many 
countries is another form of denial, which I believe will keep the 
global trading system from building the public support it deserves.
    Finally, we must work to protect and to improve the environment as 
we expand trade. Two weeks ago, I signed an Executive order requiring 
careful environmental review of our major trading agreements early 
enough to make a difference, including the input of the public and 
outside experts and considering genuinely held concerns. We stand ready 
to cooperate as you develop similar systems, and to integrate the 
environment more fully into trade policy.
    We are committed to finding solutions which are win-win, that 
benefit both the economy and the environment, open trade and cutting-
edge clean technologies, which I believe will be the next industrial 
revolution. We will continue to support WTO rules that recognize a 
nation's right to take science-based health, safety, and environmental 
measures, even when they're higher than international standards.
    Now I want to say something about this. Again I know, there are some 
people who believe my concern and the concern of the United States about 
the environment is another way that somehow we can keep the developing 
countries down. That is not true. There are basically two great clusters 
of environmental issues facing the world today. First, there are the 
local issues faced primarily by the developing nations: healthy water 
systems and sewer systems, systems to restrict soil erosion and to 
otherwise promote the public health.
    It is in everyone's interest to help those things to be installed as 
quickly and efficiently as possible. But the real issue that affects us 
all, that prompts my insistence that we put this issue on the agenda, is 
global warming and the related issue of the loss of species in the world 
as a consequence of global warming.
    And the difference in this issue and previous environmental issues 
is this: Once the greenhouse gases get in the atmosphere, they take a 
long time, 100 years or more, to dispel. Therefore, one nation's policy, 
including ours--and we are now the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, 
in the United States. We won't be long, but we are now. But we have to 
do something about this. And I want to say to you what I said to the 
people at our table. There is now clear and compelling scientific, 
technological evidence that it is no longer necessary for a poor country 
growing rich to do so by emitting more greenhouse gas emissions. Or in 
plainer language, a nation can develop a middle class and develop wealth 
without burning more oil and coal in traditional manners. This is a sea 
change in the reality that existed just a few years ago.
    And let's be candid; most people don't believe it. A lot of people 
in our country don't believe it. But in everything from transportation 
to manufacturing to the generation of electricity to the construction of 
buildings, it is now possible to grow an economy with much less injury 
to the atmosphere, with available technologies. And within 5 years 
breathtaking changes in the way automobile engines work and in the way 
fuel is made, especially from biomass, will make these trends even more 
clear.
    I do not believe the United States has the right to ask India or 
Pakistan or China or any other country to give up economic growth. But I 
do believe that all of us can responsibly say, if you can grow at the 
same rate without doing what we did--that is fouling the environment

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and then cleaning it up; Mr. Kono remembers--I 
remember the first time I went to Tokyo over 20 years ago, people wore 
masks riding their bicycles around, and now the air there is cleaner 
than it is in my hometown in Arkansas.
    What is the difference now? It is not just a national issue. If you 
foul the atmosphere and then you later clean it up, the greenhouse gases 
are still up there, and they'll be there for 100 years, warming the 
climate.
    Now, we do not have a right to ask anybody to give up economic 
growth. But we do have a right to say, if we're prepared to help you 
finance a different path to growth, and we can prove to you--and you 
accept, on the evidence--that your growth will be faster, not smaller, 
that you'll have more good jobs, more new technology, a broader base for 
your economy, then I do believe we ought to have those kind of 
environmental standards. And we ought to do it in a voluntary way with 
available technologies. But we ought to put environment at the core of 
our trade concerns.
    Now I don't know if I've persuaded any of you about any of this. But 
I know one thing: This is a better world than it would have been if our 
forebears hadn't done this for the last 50 years. If we're going to go 
into the next 50 years, we have to recognize that we're in a very 
different environment. We're in a total information society, where 
information has already been globalized, and citizens all over the world 
have been empowered. And they are knocking on the door here, saying, 
``Let us in, and listen to us. This is not an elite process anymore. 
This is a process we want to be heard in.''
    So I implore you, let's continue to make progress on all the issues 
where clearly we can. Let's open the process and listen to people even 
when we don't agree with them. We might learn something, and they'll 
feel that they've been part of a legitimate process. And let's continue 
to find ways to prove that the quality of life of ordinary citizens in 
every country can be lifted, including basic labor standards and an 
advance on the environmental front.
    If we do this, then 50 years from now the people who will be sitting 
in all these chairs will be able to have the same feelings about you 
that Mr. Moore articulated our feelings for the 
World War II generation.
    Thank you very much, and welcome again.

Note: The President spoke at 3:05 p.m. in the Spanish Room at the Four 
Seasons Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Deputy U.S. Trade 
Representative Susan G. Esserman; World Trade Organization Director-
General Mike Moore; European Commission President Romano Prodi; and 
Minister of Foreign Affairs Yohei Kono of Japan. The President also 
referred to GSP, the Generalized System of Preferences. The Executive 
order on environmental review of trade agreements is listed in Appendix 
D at the end of this volume. A portion of these remarks could not be 
verified because the tape was incomplete.