Remarks of

The Honorable John D. Negroponte

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations

Keynote Speaker

at the National Foreign Trade Council

2003 World Trade Dinner

November 10, 2003

Thank you very much for that kind introduction.

I’m delighted to be here again at the National Foreign Trade Council’s annual dinner—an event that has become a welcome and elegant New York tradition.  Diana and I were here as guests two years ago, and I’m honored that you have asked me to address you this evening.

Before proceeding to the heart of my remarks,  I’d like to acknowledge the NFTC leadership, including its board of directors; its chairman, Michael Jordan; its president, Bill Reinsch and NFTC’s hardworking staff including my former colleague, Anne Alonzo.  Anne worked with me in Mexico city to help ensure the successful negotiation of NAFTA while I served as U.S. Ambassador to Mexico.  

For almost a century, of course, American business has used the NFTC to champion global commerce and open foreign markets to American trade and investment.  

Your fundamental belief – that America’s values and interests require active involvement in world affairs by an engaged private sector—has sustained you and the American economy through some stiff challenges and tough times.  The fact that you have seen more ups than downs proves that you have been, and remain, 100% right. 

There is no better, or even plausible, alternative to American business doing its utmost to shape an increasingly globalized world according to the principles of a free marketplace.

This is good for the United States in more ways than I can enumerate.  It is good for American investors; it is good for American workers; and it is good for our broader national ability to promote peace, security, and stability—in a word, democracy—abroad.

 As we seek to advance the full range of U.S. interests at the UN, therefore, I want to recognize the substantial contributions U.S. business and the National Foreign Trade Council make to America’s standing in the world every day of the week and every week of the year.

A cornerstone of U.S. involvement in the UN is promoting fundamental freedoms, and one of the most basic catalysts of economic growth and development in the developing world is trade liberalization—allowing free markets to work to create jobs and opportunity for all elements of society.  That is a cardinal principle of the president’s millennium challenge account, which will enhance core development assistance fifty percent by fiscal year 2006. It is also the foundation of what the NFTC has advocated for almost 90 years.

In this regard, I thank you for your leadership of business coalitions supporting free trade agreements between the U.S. and Morocco and the Southern Africa Customs Union. These FTAs are a priority of the administration.  Business support is vital to their successful negotiation.

Here let me note that Morocco’s Ambassador to the United States, His Excellency Aziz Mekouar, is with us tonight.  Mr. Ambassador, you deserve a special round of applause for your leadership in the U.S.-Morocco free trade agreement negotiations.

The NFTC itself deserves high praise for its important work on the WTO Doha Development Agenda. Your leadership in pushing all nations to seek bold outcomes will increase economic opportunity everywhere, especially in parts of the world that need it most.

This is enormously important to us at the UN, where we have worked hard to build a strong partnership to fight famine.  As I noted in a speech before the UN Economic and Social Council in Geneva last June, over 800 million people are malnourished around the globe.  Nearly 80% of these hungry souls are women and children.  This is intolerable.  Answers have to be found, and found quickly.

The administration believes that increased agricultural productivity is a critical component of fighting poverty and hunger. As a consequence, we took action last year when we rolled out the “initiative to end hunger in Africa,” augmenting funding for African agriculture by 25%. 

The U.S. is pleased that the African Union Heads of State and Government are addressing the critical agricultural and rural development sectors.  Our commitment to implementing the initiative to end hunger in Africa rests on the recognition that success requires sustained investments in agriculture-based strategies, programs, and policies, in conjunction with improvements in health, education, infrastructure, environment, and public policy management.

Science and technology, in particular, offer tremendous potential for increasing productivity and income for the poor without further degradation of the environment.  Biotechnology, for example, is capable of boosting the nutritional value of foods, increasing crop yields, reducing pesticide use, making crops disease and drought resistant, generating income in rural areas, and even vaccinating infants against diphtheria, tetanus and measles.

Sadly, some in the world use campaigns of misinformation and fear in an attempt to squelch this promising technology’s usage.  In our view, decisions about food safety should be based on scientific fact, not political conjecture or public hysteria.

I therefore applaud the NFTC’s leadership in bringing together business groups concerned about the growing use of non-science based risk regulations as disguised protectionist trade barriers. Your efforts to make sure that sound science remains the benchmark for international trade regulation are enormously helpful in keeping hope alive for the world’s malnourished millions.

Another important feature of the president’s Millennium Challenge Account is its emphasis on transparency in government and fighting corruption.  I know NFTC shares his concern, so I am pleased to highlight for you last month’s adoption by the General Assembly of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption.

Like other anti-crime treaties before it, the new convention establishes commitments to criminalize certain undesirable and harmful conduct – in this case, corrupt actions such as bribery, embezzlement, and money laundering.  But the convention does not stop there.  It also requires that governments take action in a number of areas – for example in public procurement, public financial management, and in regulating their public officials — that will help prevent corruption from happening in the first place.

This is vital not only to the rule of law, but to the fundamental confidence citizens must have for representative government and private enterprise to succeed.

Corruption and democracy are incompatible; corruption and economic prosperity are incompatible; and corruption and equal opportunity are incompatible.

But our work at the UN and NFTC’s efforts are compatible, and so I am sure we can count on your support for the new convention just as we count on you to keep making the case for free trade and scientific and technological innovation.

I’d like to conclude my remarks this evening by noting that even as we face critical challenges in places like Iraq, we must always remember that real peace, real freedom, and real opportunity are ultimately created through commerce, once the guns have been silenced. 

Men and women living ordinary lives do the most extraordinary things.  Our soldiers in Iraq know this.  They are making incalculable sacrifices so that Iraqis—and all the citizens of the Middle East—can join the rest of us who rejoice in the blessings of an ordinary life, giving them the chance to rebuild their destroyed institutions and fix their broken economy.

This is where the NFTC’s policies and initiatives come in.

 By helping develop a world built on free market principles, you are doing nothing less than helping develop a world built on freedom itself—and a free world will be a peaceful, well-fed, and well-educated world as well.

Again, I appreciate the opportunity to speak here this evening, and I am grateful for your support of what America is trying to accomplish at the United Nations.

Thank you very much.