(Geneva) The director general of the WTO called on Wednesday for an acceleration of the negotiations after the decision to reconvene the major ministerial meeting in mid-June, postponed several times due to the pandemic.
Posted at 1:10 p.m.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s appeal comes as discussions at the World Trade Organization-whether on subsidies for overfishing and illegal fishing, on agriculture or on intellectual property issues related to the fight against COVID-19-stomp.
“WTO members have decided today to set the twelfth Ministerial Conference for the week of June 13! It’s great to have a date. Now, let’s step up the work! There is a lot to do,” the WTO chief tweeted.
The new date, decided after Switzerland lifted almost all health measures against COVID-19, was taken by consensus.
The countries also agreed to start negotiations for Turkmenistan’s accession to the organization, which has 164 members. 23 other countries and territories have started a negotiation process to join the WTO, some of them for many years like Algeria and Iran.
“Turkmenistan, a country in Central Asia with around 6.2 million inhabitants, is the last of the former Soviet republics to apply for accession to the WTO”, specifies the organization.
It is also in another Central Asian country, Kazakhstan, that the WTO ministerial conference was to be held in June 2020, the first since the end of 2017. But it had been postponed following the appearance of the first cases of COVID-19 at the end of 2019. Rescheduled at the end of 2021, it had been postponed again at the last minute for health reasons, following the appearance of the Omicron variant.
Although being held in Geneva, the 12and The WTO Ministerial Conference will still be co-chaired by Kazakhstan, alongside Switzerland.
“Bad karma”
Mme Okonjo-Iweala, the first woman and first African to lead the WTO, hopes to snatch an agreement on the response to the pandemic during this meeting. But divisions between countries, including over the issue of a temporary suspension of patents for vaccines and other technologies against COVID-19, persist.
To advance these discussions, the United States, the European Union, India and South Africa launched a small group in December to negotiate a compromise on this issue of intellectual property and access to vaccines in poor countries.
At a meeting on Tuesday, several countries stressed that they appreciated the efforts made by this small group to try to find a compromise. Only Switzerland has been openly critical of the process, saying the breakout format does not align with core WTO principles, according to a Geneva-based trade representative.
Mme Ngozi also wants to find an agreement against public aid for overfishing and illegal fishing, a subject under discussion at the WTO for two decades.
The negotiations promise to be more complicated.
“It is possible that very difficult negotiations in one area could create bad karma that would carry over to other discussions,” warned WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell at a press conference.
The WTO is also still in institutional crisis with an appeals tribunal that no longer works since the United States neutralized it at the end of 2019 by blocking the appointment of new judges, calling for the overhaul of this body.
Some, including the United States and the European Union, are calling more generally for a reform of the WTO, where certain major economic powers, such as China, can still benefit from the status of developing countries.
In this regard, Mr.me Okonjo-Iweala called on countries on Wednesday to give a “clear indication” of what they mean by WTO reform, as “there is no consensus on what exactly that means,” said Okonjo-Iweala. reported Mr. Rockwell.