Minister Lehtomäki to attend the OECD Ministerial Council Meeting

Press release 139/2005
29.4.2005

OECD’s (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) annual Ministerial Council Meeting will be held this year in Paris on 3–4 May. The meeting will be chaired by Sweden, with Japan and the United States as vice-chairs.

Finland’s delegation will be headed by Paula Lehtomäki, Minister for Foreign Trade and Development. The general theme of the Ministerial Council Meeting will be globalisation and its effects on the world economy’s prospects for growth. During the meeting finance and trade ministers will discuss structural adjustments necessitated by globalisation. Energy investments will be the topic of discussion at the joint session for energy, finance and trade ministers.

The purpose of the ministerial meeting is, through the UN Secretary General, to give the OECD’s message for the session reviewing the progress of the UN Millennium Declaration. The organisational reform launched by the OECD will also be discussed in brief during the meeting. Finally, there will be discussion of the situation regarding the WTO Doha negotiation round. Under the item on globalisation and structural adjustment, a particular topic of discussion will be the service sector; this item is considered in advance to be among those most interesting from the Finnish perspective.

No decisions as such are expected of the Ministerial Council Meeting; instead, the outcome of the broad discussions is recorded in the chairman’s summary and the organisation’s message to the UN Secretary General.

Prior to the OECD Ministerial Council Meeting, an International Energy Agency (IEA) Ministerial Meeting will also be held in Paris, thereby enabling a joint session on current energy investment issues related to the world economy.

A parallel event, the OECD Forum 2005 entitled “Fuelling the Future”, will be organised as high-level panels about the same themes as the ministerial meeting. One of these panels is “Beyond the Millennium Development Goals”, about the Helsinki Process and the post-Millennium Declaration era. Among the panellists are: Minister Lehtomäki; Ambassador Ami Mpungwe representing Tanzania; Susan George, the Vice-President of ATTAC; and John Evans, the General Secretary of the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD.

Additional information: Counsellor Vesa Hölttä, tel. +358 9 1605 5741 and Okko-Pekka Salmimies, Special Adviser to the Minister, mobile tel. +358 40 735 6545.