Mahathir warns of global trade risks
Mahathir warns of global trade risks
SINGAPORE (Reuters): Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, in his familiar stance as a defender of developing countries, warned South East Asian nations on Monday to look after themselves first before backing trade globalisation.
Mahathir, speaking in Singapore after receiving ASEAN Achievement Millennium Award, said countries in the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) must first reach a consensus before giving support to the formulation of a new international trade and investment regime.
"If ASEAN is to be meaningful it must look after the interest of all its members," he said.
Mahathir, still furious over currency traders' attack on the region four years ago, also repeated his verbal attacks on them, together with developed countries and the World Trade Organization (WTO).
He said nowhere should ASEAN be more united than in any negotiation of a new world economic order at the WTO's next meeting in Doha, Qatar, in November.
The European Union and the United States hope to launch a new round of world trade liberalization talks in Doha to help boost a flagging world economy.
"We have had a foretaste of globalization when the currency traders devalued our currencies and precipitated a financial crisis of unprecedented severity," he said.
Mahathir said what was frightening was the preparation being made by "the rich" to take full advantage of the WTO and the free borderless market.
"We see the huge corporations and banks of the rich already merging and acquiring each other so that they become colossal and unbeatable," he said.
"But when business corporations become richer and bigger than most nation states, they will want to dictate to the whole world so as to cater to their unlimited greed. Nations will cease to be independent," Mahathir said.
Singapore's Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, was also given the ASEAN award.
In his speech, he said that unless investors could use the comparative and competitive advantages of ASEAN to manufacture and carry out final assembly of different products for sale within ASEAN and for export, the ASEAN region might be sidelined.
"The logic of the situation is simple. If ASEAN is a joint market of 500 million people, though with less average per capita purchasing power than China's 1.25 billion, the prospects must be better for all in ASEAN," Lee said.
Mahathir and Lee were presented with specially struck medallions bearing their portraits for creating dynamic economies with political stability.
The WTO's last effort to launch world trade talks collapsed amid street protests and teargas in Seattle in December 1999, when countries failed to agree on a negotiating agenda.