Trade and industry minister Alec Erwin says the global economy needs to have a sense of crisis and urgency in its resolve to deal with the disparity between developed and developing countries.

Addressing the World Trade Organisation (WTO) conference in Qatar, the Minister spoke at length about the consequences of unbalanced trade and the perception that the world's people have of the WTO as a manager of the global economy.

Seeking to put forth South Africa's common position of the world economy and issues influencing it, Mr Erwin said there were links between trade, development and the environment.

'Our interconnectivity is now so great that we need to ensure that there is an ongoing process of governing our trade and investment relations.

We will have to find new ways of doing things.'

He said the links were complex, 'the implications of negotiating rules in this area are not fully understood and, in many ways, the issues that arise go beyond the WTO's competence.' 'Hence we require time for deeper reflection and dialogue on these and their implications for the trading system,' he added.

'We will have an opportunity for locating this dialogue in the broader conceptual framework of sustainable development at the World Summit on Sustainable Development that South Africa will host next year.' For South Africa, the conference should be an occasion to redress issues of global inequality and high levels of poverty, he said.

Minister Erwin told delegates that 'civil societies in the developed and developing world were reacting to different pressures but coming to similar, largely inaccurate conclusions about the WTO.

The high standards of living, the heightened levels of social awareness and availability of information in the developed economies have been alerted to real threats to the environment that could result from rapid and integrated global growth.

'Since WTO regulates trade and investment it is seen as the means that greedy governments and manipulative interests use to insulate this reckless growth from legitimate social sanction and monitoring,' the Minister said.

More than 140 developed and developing countries are attending the conference, including China and Taiwan who were accepted as the newest members over the weekend. The conference started last Friday and ends tomorrow.