The world's failure to bring countries from the Greater Middle East into the global trade system has helped fuel unrest in Arab nations, a former top US diplomat said on Friday. "The WTO must address the single most destabilising gap in international trade, and that is the Middle East," Charlene Barshefsky, US Trade Representative from 1996 to 2001, told a forum in Beijing.
"This is the single greatest failure of the global system and is critical to put on the agenda in a real way." The 57 countries in what Barshefsky termed the Greater Middle East - including places like former Soviet central Asia - made up 10 percent of the world population but accounted for just 1 percent of global trade.
"Its unemployment rates are double the world average. This is precisely the economic structure, above all when laid into the region's political tension and isolation, that produces rage and violence," Barshefsky said.
"The isolation of the Middle East, its reliance on oil alone, the absence of manufacturing trade and investment, its basic failure to develop, is not only the global economy's single greatest failure, it is the greatest risk to world peace."
Though regional heavyweights like Saudi Arabia and Egypt are World Trade Organisation members, countries with large energy resources and populations such as Iran, Iraq, Algeria and Uzbekistan are not.
"It is up to the region, first and foremost, to solve its own problems, but their problems are all of our problems, and it is up to the great powers - the US, Europe, Japan and China - to rectify the situation by bringing these countries in," she said.