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The Workshop has been organised by the WTO Secretariat in cooperation
with UNCTAD, and with the support of the Government of Japan through
the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA).
Technical
workshops of this kind are being held regularly throughout the period
up to the 5th Ministerial Session in Cancun to allow WTO Members and
observer governments to prepare in an informal setting for discussions
in the Working Group on the Relationship between Trade and Investment.
Their aim is to assist developing and least-developed countries to
better evaluate the implications of closer multilateral cooperation on
Investment for their development policies and objectives.
The
active participation of all developing countries is indispensable to
the success of the Doha work programme, but resource constraints make
it difficult for many of them to participate as often and as
intensively as they would wish in the Geneva process. For this special
Workshop, therefore, with support from JICA, financing has been made
available to invite a capital-based official from each
English-speaking African Member country to visit Geneva for a few days
so as to participate not only in the Workshop, but also in the
subsequent meeting of the Working Group that will take place on 3-4
December.
That
will be the Working Group’s final meeting of the year, at which it
will review the work that has been completed since Doha and discuss
its end-of-year report to the WTO General Council. By participating in
it, capital-based officials from African countries will have the
opportunity of taking stock of the progress that has been made in this
area since Doha, and of participating with other WTO Members in
charting the course of further work on Trade and Investment in the
run-up to the Cancun Ministerial Conference.
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