The head of the World Trade Organisation marked sixty years of the multilateral trading system on Tuesday with a warning against any revival of protectionism. WTO director general Pascal Lamy noted that the global economy was now much more interlinked than at the time of the Great Depression in the 1930s and that ‘protectionist policies would lead to a domino effect with far more catastrophic consequences.’

The WTO was set up in 1995 as a successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, itself founded on January 1, 1948 in a bid to avoid the rampant protectionism of the pre-Second World War economy.

For the past six years, the WTO’s 151 members have wrestled with the Doha Development Round’s proposals to further liberalise trade, without much success, as developed and developing countries remain at loggerheads over agricultural subsidies and industrial tariffs.

The impasse has led to some calls for more protectionist measures, notably in the United States.

Lamy warned against such calls, saying that one must always be on guard against protectionist impulses, which seem inevitable at certain moments.

‘It is often good politics to blame others for problems which are largely your own,’ he added.

Lamy was speaking at the launch of the WTO’s annual trade report for 2007 which took an overview of the past 60 years of the multilateral trading system.

Global trade grew by a factor of 27 over the past six decades, three times higher than global economic output, the report said.