Extract from the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) Gap Task Force Report

Extract from the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) Gap Task Force Report, prepared for the UN Summit on MDGs in 2010. To read the full report, click here.

To enable developing countries to reap greater gains from trade, the MDG Gap Task Report 2010 recommends that the international community should:

• Intensify efforts to conclude, within a realistic timeframe, a development-oriented Doha Round of trade negotiations in order to effectively establish a more open, equitable, rule-based, predictable and non-discriminatory multilateral trading system
   
• Ensure that developing countries, especially the most vulnerable among them, are given the flexibility and support needed to strengthen their production and trading capacities as part of broader development strategies. Developing such country capacity is a function of both domestic policy choices and international support and requires that:
  
  
  • developing countries continue to prioritize trade and its links to development and poverty reduction in national development strategies 
  • donors accelerate delivery on existing aid commitments, including through renewed technical, finanacial and political support to the Enhanced Integrated Framework, which is the entry point for LDCs in accessing Aid for Trade 
   

• Ensure that protectionist measures taken as a response to crises are dismantled and that further measures, including new forms of non-tariff barriers, are resisted
   
• Accelerate delivery on the commitments made by developed countries in 2005 to eliminate, by 2013, all agricultural export subsidies and other support measures with equivalent effect, in order to increase the ability of developing countries to produce and export agricultural products competitively.

Accelerate progress towards the full implementation of DFQF market access for all products exported by LDCs, which remains a critical aspect for accelerating employment creation in LDC export sectors, and combine this with the creation of more transparent and simplified rules of origin.