Brussels, 13/02/2009 (Agence Europe) - Along with the food crisis, developing countries, fighting money-laundering, terrorism and financial regulation, much of the meeting of G7 (sic) finance ministers in Rome on Saturday 14 February 2009 will be given over to discussions about protectionism. The meeting will be attended by the finance ministers of Germany, Canada, the United States, France, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and Russia, and will be followed by a G20 Summit in London on 2 April 2009. The finance ministers of the most industrialised countries will reaffirm their pledge to not make use of protectionist measures to tackle the economic crisis. The worst economic and financial crisis since the Second World War has in recent months generated protectionist measures like the Buy American clause that was later dropped from the Obama Administration's Recovery Plan in the United States, public support for threatened banks and industries by automobile, but also taxes on the import of foreign cars into Russia and the ban on the import of Chinese toys into India. Faced with protectionist pressures, the Director General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Pascal Lamy, who has been invited to the Rome meeting, will make a case for free trade as the way out of the current crisis. He will insist on the need for three things -the recovery plans must not ignore trade; that the financing of trade (based on short-term guarantees and loans) should not be held back; and that the recovery plans should include sections on development aid. In defence of his argument, Lamy will present the latest WTO report on recent developments in world trade in response to the financial crisis and developments in trade policy, that was discussed in Geneva on Monday and is due to be updated on March ahead of the G20 Summit (see EUROPE 9837). (E.H. trans fl)