Following President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s announcement nominating Deputy Secretary Jesús Seade towards the post of Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the present chief USMCA negotiator today held an online press conference. The exchange with national reporters and foreign correspondents was held to explain the candidacy from the deputy secretary, that has were built with a long and prominent career, as the next thing needed to strengthen the World Trade Organization, specifically, and also the global multilateral architecture, overall.
Jesús Seade comes with an extensive knowledge of the economies and trade dynamics in Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, the center East and North America, and well-established relationships using the leading actors in world trade. His long experience in the most crucial international economic organizations -including the overall Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the planet Bank (WB) and also the World Trade Organization itself- is a established track record of his abilities within these key multilateral trade institutions.
As Mexico’s ambassador to the GATT, Deputy Secretary Seade gave it important victories in trade disputes over antidumping duties on cement and also the tuna embargo. He also represented Mexico as chief negotiator to the Uruguay Round, the origin of the current WTO. Negotiations were paralyzed, and it was decided to make changes towards the GATT senior leadership. The organization unanimously appointed Peter Sutherland as the new director-general, with then-Ambassador Seade as the new deputy director-general.
The new team steered the negotiations to a successful conclusion, including renegotiating benefits for that least-developed countries (LDCs), mainly in Africa, a process led by Deputy SecretarySeade. This number of negotiations resulted in the creation of the WTO as a replacement for the GATT, where Seade served as founding deputy director-general.
At the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as a senior advisor, he was responsible for handling the IMF’s policies around the financial crises in Argentina, Turkey and Brazil, also negotiating debt settlement for fifteen high-debt African countries, confirming his experience with developing economies and his skill as a negotiator. He also served previously as principal economist at the World Bank. At both institutions, he led technical assistance missions for more than fifty countries in Africa, the center East and Latin America.
Jesús Seade studied Chemical Engineering in the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and received master’s and doctoral degrees in Economics from the University of Oxford, England, underneath the guidance from the Nobel Prize in Economics, James Mirrlees. He wrote his doctoral thesis on optimal tax policies for income distribution. He was chair professor at Warwick University, UK, and founding director from the Center for Economic Studies of El Colegio de México (Colmex), in addition to executive secretary from the Mexican Nuclear Energy Commission. In Hong Kong, he was v . p . of Lingnan University, as well as in China he was associate vice president for Global Affairs in the Chinese University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen. He's also served as senior advisor to the Hong Kong Secretaries of monetary Services and Trade and Industry, just before becoming Mexico's chief negotiator of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in 2023.
The nomination of Undersecretary Seade to the post of WTO Director-General by the Government of Mexico comes in recognition of his experience and abilities but, most importantly, is really a manifestation of the country’s resolve for the multilateral order. Mexico is nominating a strong candidate with the experience and ability to represent the best global interests in free trade, in a key moment for protecting and promoting multilateralism and international cooperation.
