Ignacio Walker
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chile

Thursday, Nov. 17th, 2005
Paradise Hotel, Busan, Korea

“Being a politician must be a vocation, not a profession”

This is the underlying principle that inspires the decisions Mr. Ignacio Walker has to take on a daily basis leading his country into the future. As a Minister of Foreign Affairs of Chile, Mr. Walker attended the APEC Political Leaders Summit in order to discuss with officials and businessmen from the region agreements that would benefit the nations of APEC further develop.

On Thursday, November 17, Mr. Walker met with a group of students from the VOICES of the Future for APEC to share insights with us, the youth aspiring to become catalysts of hope for our own economies. In the lobby of the Paradise Hotel, with an open handshake and friendly smile, Minister Walker joined us at a table for a talk in the spirit more of a peer acquaintance rather than as a high-profile official we expected to find bureaucratically formal and distant.

Minister Walker believes passionately in the benefits from eliminating trade subsidies – which calls for an honest commitment from the developed nations including the EU, the United States, and Japan – to give the developing countries their chance for global competitiveness and thus bring forward long-term, sustainable economic growth around the globe.

In respect to the social impact of trade liberalization, globalization for Minister Walker does entail hard adjustments, but a lot more importantly, it provides the governments with the resources (from increased trade) and the policy experience exchange with other countries to apply to their domestic reality a variety of measurements for social development. Called Growth with Equity Strategy, Chile has been implementing a successful economic liberalization with simultaneous active social policy in the spheres of education, health, housing, and employment training, thus lowering the poverty percentage from 40 to 18 percent of the Chilean population in only 15 years of the currently ruling political coalition. Income distribution, however, is still a challenge for the Chilean economy to address.

Minister Walker was seventeen when a coup d’etat shook his nation and imposed a centralized military regime. He was thirty-four when democracy returned to Chile, and Mr. Walker, then a lawyer, felt it was his life vocation to make sure his country manages to consolidate democracy as the ultimate freedom of choice and expression, and to help build healthy citizenship with creative visions. Between the realms of politics and academics for a few years, Mr. Walker was eventually appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs.

A sign of Chile’s determination to open trade frontiers are the fifteen signed bilateral FTAs and especially the recent signing of the FTA with China, which is China’s first trade agreement outside of ASEAN, which Minister Walker sees as a remarkable achievement for Chile and a vent for a plethora of advances on both sides. Some goods will have a 10-year period of tariff-reduction, which is an example of how to buffer the possible negative effects of liberalization and make the most out of the process. “The world is moving from Europe to Asia,” Henry Kissinger said once and this is what Mr. Walker fervently believes in his dedication to strengthening APEC on its way to an FTA for the whole Asia-Pacific region.

Intelligent trade opening with social concerns is Minister Walker’s recommendation for all of us, the young leaders, who try to understand globalization and how to implement development economics to harness liberalization for overall human wellbeing. We smiled back, shook hands with the Minister, and left the meeting with more insights to guide us forward.