DVORIKI VILLAGE, August 2. /TASS/. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is not ideal but there is no global alternative to it, Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Tuesday at the youth forum.
"There is no alternative to the World Trade Organization for the time being. This is not because it is an ideal organization determining fundamentals of the global trade and doing all that fairly properly. This is simply because nothing exists except the WTO," the PM said. Russia followed exactly such considerations when presenting the WTO application," Medvedev added.
Membership in the WTO provides opportunities but also creates certain problems, Medvedev said. It provides Russia with a possibility to demand compliance with WTO rules and apply to court in case Russian interests are violated, he said. "The affair of the state is to maximize protection of national business with use of WTO procedures," he added.
The premier said the creation of individual trans-border partnerships as an alternative to the WTO may drive the global trade 50-70 years back.
"There is an attempt against the WTO. You know that trans-border partnerships created are essentially an alternative to the WTO," Medvedev said. "However, our position is that we should not fragment the global economy’s regulation field, because it will turn out in this case that we will be driven back to the situation of 50-70 years back, he added.
This will result in individual agreements between countries not taken into consideration by other nations, leading to disruption of the global trade, Medvedev said.
Such partnerships shall be created publicly and on the basis of main principles of the WTO, he said. "Only in such case new projects have a moral right to existence from our point of view," Medvedev added.