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Trade and Development Board, 77th executive session

Statement by Rebeca Grynspan, Secretary-General of UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD)

Trade and Development Board, 77th executive session

Geneva, Switzerland
03 February 2025

Your Excellency, Ambassador Bekkers, President of the Trade and Development Board,

Distinguished Ambassadors,

Dear colleagues,

Dear friends,

It was less than a month ago when I presented my report for the 16th session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD16), and it feels like a lot of time has passed.

We are in very complex times, so it is important to analyze the events with a clear head. UNCTAD will be doing that and sharing it with all of you. But today I want to focus on what I consider a crucial moment for this board – the formal start of our preparations for UNCTAD16.

This month, the different groups will begin the vital work of preparing their position papers that will be presented on the 20th of this month. Unfortunately, I will not be physically in the room. I will be in Johannesburg attending the G20 Foreign Ministers Meeting at the request of the Government of South Africa.

This is an important gathering to attend. As you know, this year will be the last in a historic four-year cycle of G20 Global South presidencies. We all want to make the most of this opportunity. But rest assured – I will be reading each and every one of your position papers extremely closely, as will be my entire team at the secretariat.

I also intend to meet – along with the President of the Trade and Development Board – with the negotiation groups to discuss your position papers once I am back from the meetings in South Africa. I look forward to discussing with you to better understand your priorities and initiatives.

Following those dialogues and based on your position papers, the Trade and Development Board presidency – with the support of the secretariat – will start working on a zero-draft, to be shared with you, I understand, by mid-March. As always, the idea is to have a solid, concise and ambitious zero-draft. We expect very lively negotiations, so it is our hope not to pre-judge any of them in our first version of the draft.

In this Trade and Development Board we will also be presenting some new UNCTAD reports to the membership, including the Trade and Development Report, the Least Developed Countries Report, the report of our Intergovernmental Group of Experts on Financing for Development, and the report of our Working Party. We will also have a session on Latin America and the Caribbean, based on a great UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) paper that will be discussed. Our different directors will be making specific presentations for each of these agenda items.

For your information, I will be presenting the Economic Development in Africa Report next week in Cote d’Ivoire.

With your permission, I want to focus my remarks on the preparatory process of UNCTAD16.

UNCTAD16, its meetings and outcome documents, will be an important test on how far we have come in revitalizing this institution and how much farther do we want to go.

The answers to these questions, excellencies, lie in your hands. Our role as secretariat is not to prescribe them but to inspire you and to support you toward the highest level of possibility.

So as you begin drafting your position papers, I urge you to be ambitious so we can support our member States to face the challenges of an emerging new global economy. We are living in a fast-changing world with new realities emerging in trade, geopolitics and geoeconomics, in technology and in climate. New and complex realities demand our attention and commitment.

The world is not waiting for us to catch up. The pace of change demands that we move quickly and decisively. The developing countries we serve cannot afford for us to be slow in our response. They need an UNCTAD that is as dynamic and adaptable as the challenges they face.

In some areas we will need fresh thinking and new approaches. Probably, we will need language that captures the urgency of our time and mandates that allow us to respond quickly to emerging challenges. And we need an institutional structure that can deliver on these ambitions.

This brings to my last point. Strengthening UNCTAD will require us also to make the most of what we have so we can increase the impact of everything we do. We have to prepare better for that, and I hope we will continue to deliver on those expectations.

We cannot ignore the context in which we are. Many sister UN agencies are now operating under very uncertain budgets. We ourselves have been struggling with two years of liquidity crisis. That said, I still think there is room for UNCTAD to come out stronger after Viet Nam. My point is that to seize that opportunity, we need to work together.

But on a more fundamental level, evolution is not about addition. It is about adaptation. Building institutions is like building muscle. You cannot simply add muscle by eating more – you need to transform existing tissue. This is the only way to build true strength and resilience.

This kind of transformation requires confidence in the process. Here, trust will be the fundamental factor and perhaps our greatest advantage.

To “shape the future”, as our theme for the Conference states, is impossible during periods of distrust. I believe we have built that trust over the past four years – it has taken a lot of hard work and good will from everybody. And great presidencies in the Board. Building trust is never a finalized task, we have to continue building trust every day, continue opening doors to advance the Bridgetown Covenant and its mandates.

We have paved the way. We have created a real opportunity to revitalize our institution and achieve a successful Conference.

So I want to close with that message. I ask you to have trust and to believe in what we can achieve together. Our times, our needs, our hopes do not give us the luxury of giving up. In the last almost four years already I have had the pleasure of meeting almost all of you. And I can safely say that you are all trying to do what is best for your countries and fellow citizens. And we are also all aware of the collective effort that work entails. Let us all give each other the respect and engagement we and the Conference in Viet Nam deserve.

We can afford no less.

I thank you.