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Chairperson,
Fellow panellists,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear Colleagues and Friends

Thank you for affording me the opportunity to participate in this important session. I am indeed honoured to be with you today for a debate, which I am confident will encourage inventive thinking on the relationship between development strategies and trade rules from an innovation and technology perspective. I was confident that the issue of special and differential treatment would be covered in depth by my fellow speakers so I am going to concentrate my remarks on innovation and science and technology for sustainable development.

Dear friends, it is indeed critical that we enhance our ability to optimally harness the contributions of science, technology and innovation as vital instruments for development. To achieve this, we must, as Ambassador Corrales-Leal so aptly pointed out, also effectively and rapidly recover the spaces for development policy within the international trade dispensation, especially from an innovation and technology perspective.

It is within this context that I would like to share with you this afternoon some thoughts on the development and implementation of innovation and technology policies for sustainable development, within the framework of and where appropriate exploiting international trade rules. I will in this regard also be referring to some of my own country's specific experiences in this field.

Dear colleagues, I would like to emphasise at the outset, that the fostering of a new global consensus on the critical role of science, technology and innovation, as essential instruments to achieve sustainable development, has been an objective which South Africa, as well as other nations of the South, has been consistently pursuing over a number of years, within all multilateral forums, including the World Trade Organisation, but perhaps most notably so at the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD).

The outcome of the WSSD, as reflected in the Political Declaration as well as the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation, adopted by the Heads of State and Government, provided new impetus to this effort, by including a number of purposeful commitments by world leaders to concertedly harness global efforts to apply science, technology and innovation for sustainable development.

Whilst the outcomes of the WSSD represent a significant leap forward for the global sustainable development agenda and indeed give much cause for celebration, it is the commitment to apply science, technology and innovation to remove barriers to and indeed actively support sustainable trade, which is perhaps most significant for our current conversation.

May I, in order to enrich our discussion, briefly sketch some contextual background. We are of course, dear colleagues, aware that developed and developing countries have not shared equally in the benefits of globalisation. I also do need to remind you that in sectors where developing countries should have a competitive advantage, such as agriculture, forestry and primary products, they are frequently prevented from exploiting their advantage.

Part of our responsibility this afternoon should, thus, be to interrogate what role trade rules, as well as science, technology and innovation should play in correcting these distortions. May I start this discussion with a look at the impact of the so-called social and environmental standards for sustainable trade. Whilst these standards have an important role to play in promoting sustainable trade and development, we must be wary that they may of course become distorting barriers themselves.

Dear friends, there can be no dispute that whilst trade agreements can remove the formal barriers to free trade, barriers based on consumer behaviour and environmental standards, will require significant investment in developing countries, aimed at science, technology and innovation capacity-building, to enable developing countries to overcome these barriers.

I would, thus, like to reiterate from this platform our call for a concerted global effort to strengthen the scientific and technological capacities of developing countries, in order to enable them, through an application of knowledge and innovation, to reduce barriers to trade emanating from consumer resistance in large markets. By way of example I would like to mention that areas where these capacities should be strengthened for example include: green agriculture, integrated pest management, low waste production and emission control and management.

Dear friends, it is of course important to bear in mind that the impact of knowledge and innovation on the relationship between trade and development not only pertains to barriers to sustainable trade, but is indeed of much wider scope. Another prime example of these dynamics is the role of science and technology in problem identification and diagnosis related to sustainable development. Let me briefly elaborate.

The capacity of nations to identify the impediments to sustainable development, and to understand them sufficiently to craft well-targeted interventions, depends to a significant degree on the information and analytical tools which are available to them.

Developing nations, you will agree dear friends, are therefore significantly handicapped within the Multilateral Environmental Agreement and trade negotiation arenas by their dependency on information collected and analysed predominantly by agencies in the developed countries.

Specific examples in this regard include the data on environmental conditions derived from space-based satellites and the computer model projections of future climate change. Even when such information is available, there are significant issues of trust and confidence around its use. Access in developing countries to these large datasets is also slow or partial, and the human and computational capacities are frequently inadequate to assimilate them effectively.

The solution, we are convinced in South Africa, is no different from our earlier response to addressing social and environmental standards. The panacea if it exists is capacity building and indeed more capacity building. What is indeed required is a parallel process to rapidly strengthen the human capacities as well as technology capacities of developing countries.

Technology and innovation of course have several other interfaces with the trade and development discourse, such as the role of technology in enabling value addition to biodiversity resource exports products or the beneficiation of mineral resources. These are of course prime examples of science and technology's critical contribution to economic growth and poverty alleviation strategies. In South Africa, science and technology have, thus, been included as cornerstones of our national growth and development strategies.

Another important area is the domain of intellectual property rights. Since Director Correa will be focusing on the role of intellectual property in the spaces for innovation, I will, however, not dwell on it.

I would, however, like to emphasise that intellectual property rights can of course both be a promoter of technology and innovation, and concurrently also be an impediment to development. The danger of course is that the international intellectual property regime frequently works against the developing world due to the high entry-cost barriers to the patent system, its lack of adequate protection for traditional knowledge, and its role in making access to knowledge and some key technologies unaffordable. It is indeed imperative that the international trade dispensation urgently addresses this concern.

May I in conclusion offer a specific example of how in South Africa, we have integrated technology and innovation with our national trade and development strategies. One of our key national policies is our Integrated Manufacturing Strategy, focused on accelerating the growth and development of South African industry and its participation in international trade.

The Integrated Manufacturing Strategy significantly emphasises that knowledge intensity is embedded at the core of the accelerated national trajectory towards economic growth and social development. Under knowledge intensity we understand the ability of South Africans to integrate ICTs, technology, innovation and knowledge intensive services into the functioning of the economy as a whole.

The manufacturing strategy is also complemented by our National Research and Development Strategy, which is focused on creating an enabling institutional environment for R&D in South Africa. The R&D Strategy is also a roadmap for developing South Africa's technological capacity and providing innovation support in strategic trade areas such as biotechnology and ICT.

Dear colleagues, these recent practical experiences in South Africa have cemented our belief that science, technology and innovation should be at the heart of the critical interface between trade and development. Indeed, knowledge and innovation are, as I have highlighted this afternoon, not only critical enabling instruments for both the development as well as trade agendas, but can indeed play a valuable role in aligning as well as enriching the trade and development interface.

Dear friends, may I in conclusion stress that the successful outcome of the Cancun Ministerial Conference is of vital importance, not only because of its impact on the economic growth of the developing world, but also since it will determine the manner science and technology can render their critical contributions to such growth. It is, thus, our collective responsibility to fill the spaces for development policy within international trade, and fill them with knowledge and innovation.

I hope these remarks will contribute to and enrich the debate during today's session and I indeed look forward in anticipation to our deliberations.

I thank you.

Issued by: Ministry for Arts, Culture, Science and Technology