WTO ministers secure deal on fisheries, food & Covid vaccine

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, June 17

The World Trade Organisation’s 12th ministerial conference met for an extra two days in Geneva to produce a “Geneva Package” which contains the first agreement in decades on fisheries subsidies as well as a consensus on WTO response to emergencies, including a waiver of compulsory licensing for Covid vaccines, food safety and agriculture and WTO reform.

In the first ministerial after four-and-a-half years, first due to Trump’s obduracy and then due to Covid, agreed on most of the main pillars — WTO’s response to the pandemic, fisheries, agriculture, WTO reform plus other issues such as e-commerce moratorium.

Pakistan cried foul and several African countries were also unhappy, but Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal claimed that India “turned the tide of negotiations from full failure, gloom and doom to optimism, enthusiasm and consensus-based decision”.

WTO Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former Nigerian Foreign Minister, said the outcome was an unprecedented package of deliverables.

Though the claims by Goyal and the statement by Okonjo-Iweala were at a slight variance, India was able to stave off an examination of its fishery subsidies for two years by agreeing to limit the time period of IPR on Covid vaccine waiver to five years instead of the 10 being demanded.

“The outcomes demonstrate that the WTO is capable of responding to the emergencies of our time. They give us cause to hope that strategic competition will be able to exist alongside growing strategic cooperation,” noted the WTO DG.

The WTO DG noted that differences on some issues, including public stockholding for food security purposes, domestic support and cotton and market access “meant that we could not achieve consensus on a new roadmap for future work”.

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