Sub-themes:

• Enhancing coherence at all levels for sustainable economic development and poverty reduction in global policy-making, including the contribution of regional approaches.
  
  Coherence is about making sure that international policies work in tandem towards our common goals. This therefore includes ensuring that the multilateral, rules-based trading regime is better aligned to help find solutions to key issues on agricultural market access, domestic support in agriculture, industrial tariffs and services. It may also require the adjustment of regional integration agreements, to ensure that they help rather than hinder the international trading system and its development objectives.
  
  Coherence may also include the global financial system, which by comparison with the trade system is far less regulated, and has failed in the past to protect some economies from the disastrous impacts of external economic shocks that can overturn years of careful planning and austerity. At the same time, many of the countries most vulnerable to external shocks are in great need of financing to develop and to reduce poverty. Regulating private capital flows and speculation while also raising the funds that developing countries need to stabilize their economies requires coherence - coherence, or agreement, between developing and developed countries and among developing countries themselves.
  
  

• Key trade and development issues and the new realities in the geography of the world economy.
  
  Over the past 15 years or so, developing countries have accounted for a growing share of world trade and investment, and that share continues to soar. The result is a totally new landscape for world economic relations, one in which the countries of the South are not only doing more business with one another, but are increasingly trading with and investing in developed countries.
  
  Rising demand and prices for oil, gas and other commodities mean booms for some countries, but economic hardship for others. The continuing exploitation and consumption of fossil fuels is devastating the climate, requiring the development of alternative energy sources, such as biofuels.
  
  All of these reali-ties will have huge ramifications for trade and development. Issues to be addressed at UNCTAD XII include how developing countries that are prospering from the boom can better translate their revenues into long-term development gains.
  
  

• Enhancing an enabling environment at all levels to strengthen productive capacity, trade and investment: mobilizing resources and harnessing knowledge for development.
  
  Productive capacities, trade and investment are interlinked and mutually reinforcing elements of the national and international economic structure. There is a great deal of cumulative causation between them.
  
  Reflecting this, an enabling environment needs to operate simultaneously at the global level -- through policies that promote an open and equitable environment -- and at the national level, through policies that foster growth, investment and entrepreneurship, as well as technology, innovation and employment.
  
  Critical international issues here include the global finance and trade systems (including the intellectual property rights systems); the rise of South-South cooperation and integration; and the role of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and international investment agreements.
  
  National level policy issues include macroeconomic policy and the complementary trade and industrial policies that can help to boost competitiveness, technological upgrading, and domestic value-added.
  
  

• Strengthening UNCTAD: enhancing its development role, impact, and institutional effectiveness.
  
  As the world changes and globalization becomes a more powerful force, UNCTAD must constantly refine its efforts to help developing countries. As the United Nations focal point for trade and development, and the interrelated issues of finance, investment, technology and sustainable development, it brings more than four decades of experience to the service of development.
  
  UNCTAD's 12th ministerial conference offers a forum to discuss ways of improving the organization's working methods. It will also help ensure that it delivers high-quality and sharply focused research and analysis; that the intergovernmental machinery is action-oriented and effective; and that UNCTAD's technical cooperation activities help create beneficial synergies and add greater value, for example by contributing to the "One UN" concept.