The pledge is far more than US$ 1 million what Nepal and other LDCs received over the last five years. Officials at Ministry of Commerce and Supplies (MoCS) said that Nepal can utilize the fund for institutional capacity building, and identifying and developing the trade facilitation and infrastructure development projects.
Nepal has further assigned United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to function as a donor facilitator (DF) to coordinate with the local donors to mobilize additional funds for implementing the projects thus developed from WTO support fund.
“The new support amount has been pledged under the Enhanced Trade Related Capacity Building Project, also known as Enhanced Integrated Framework (EIF), under the WTO,” Commerce Secretary Purushottam Ojha told myrepublica.com.
He elaborated that Nepal would use the support to develop institutional capacity and trade development projects, as delineated in the EIF.
Nepal is presently finalizing the EIF, including an action plan for implementing the prominent trade development projects. Institutional capacity building, connectivity and infrastructure development, customs harmonization, trade facilitation and programs aimed at addressing the country’s supply side constraints are among the major priority areas being focused in the EIF.
Although the priority areas are same as in the past framework, officials stated that meager support from the advanced countries had prevented it from making concrete progress in trade promotion.
Despite higher needs assessment, Nepal had received mere US$ 200,000 a year over the last five years. “With that we could only work in bits and pieces in the areas of capacity building and identification of trade potentials,” said a MoCS official.
Similar was the grievances of other LDC members. Although developed members extended technical support in the field of quality and standard certification and customs harmonization, smaller economies have charged them of not giving enough. They have also raised serious questions over the effectiveness of support they received.
Subsequently, LDCs including Nepal have long been pushing for the advanced WTO members to standby their commitments to support LDCs to comply with costly WTO commitments and develop trade.
Amid rising criticism, the developed members did commit LDCs to support project-based financing for trade development of the poorer countries and endorsed ‘Aid for Trade’ Program. However, they have acted slowly in implementing the same.
“Only good news so far is that donors have doubled their support for institutional capacity building to 150,000 dollar for us,” said the source. They have also agreed to extend as US$ 12 million for pursuing project-development studies. However, the extent of support is still far below the requirement.
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