New WTO chief is all smiles

GENEVA -- Mike Moore formally took over as director-general of the World Trade Organization yesterday, expressing a desire to get to know everybody and even to face his opponents.

The former New Zealand prime minister was all smiles on his first day in the job after a leadership race that split the WTO and ended with a compromise that was said to satisfy nobody.

Under the agreement which finally settled the leadership dispute, Moore will serve three years in office and will then be replaced by his rival for the post, Thai Commerce Minister Supachai Panitchpakdi.

Moore went around the offices at the WTO's headquarters on the banks of Lake Geneva to meet the staff, and even expressed interest in meeting a small group of anti-WTO campaigners who demonstrated outside the building.

"I like people who believe in things," said Moore, a former labor activist.

Moore stressed the importance of reaching an agreement for China to join the organization as soon as possible.

"China is a superpower and has to sit at the table one day. I'll do anything I can to facilitate China's membership," he told Associated Press Television News.

China's application has been pending for 13 years as members have negotiated with Beijing over conditions that would apply to the world's most populous country.

Moore said his major concern would be to make sure that smaller countries had the same access to the benefits of the WTO as larger ones at the global trade meeting in Seattle in late November and early December.

"The WTO was created to give each nation, each member government, the opportunity to raise standards of living, to expand the production of and trade in goods and services and to promote sustainable development," he said. "I intend to devote all my efforts to ensuring that we live up to that promise."

A half-dozen protesters tied placards to the railings of the WTO, claiming it made it easier for multinational companies to control the world's economy.

"We think that the liberal model of trade that this organization promotes is incompatible with a durable development of all countries, north and south," said protester Barbara Bordogna of Switzerland. "Economic considerations prevail over everything else."

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