Last night saw the announcement of a new and “unprecedented” agreement within the World Trade Organization. Quotation marks for the terms of the press conference to present the final texts of the organization’s ministerial conference. The agreements promise to inaugurate interesting agendas, yes, but, due to the characteristics of the WTO and the current world context, they will be the result of all kinds of criticism.
There were six main points present in the agreements. The relaxation of intellectual property rights for vaccines against Covid-19, food security, combating illegal fishing and its subsidies, e-commerce and reform of the governance of the WTO itself. For the organization’s director-general, Nigerian Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, “the package of agreements will make a difference in the lives of people around the world” and “demonstrate that the WTO is indeed capable of responding to the emergencies of our time. ”.
When the former Nigerian minister speaks of “emergencies of our time” she is referring to both the pandemic and food insecurity directly related to the war in Ukraine, as Russia and Ukraine are among the world’s biggest cereal exporters, with this trade going through Black Sea. And indeed, it is fair to say that the WTO addressed these issues at its ministerial conference, held under immense pressure.
Pressure
The last WTO ministerial conference had been held in Buenos Aires in December 2017, more than four years ago. The conference that was supposed to be held in Nur-Sultan, the capital of Kazakhstan, was postponed twice, because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The postponements, plus the protests that took place in the country at the turn of 2021 to 2022, motivated the change of location, to Geneva, headquarters of the WTO. Still, the Kazakh authorities were the main organizers.
Furthermore, the Buenos Aires conference did not present important final agreements. The years from 2017 to 2019 were of paralysis at the WTO, as the then US government of President Donald Trump froze several judge appointment processes, paralyzing the judgment of disputes between countries, and boycotted the process of reforming the governance of the organization.
The current conference began, then, under the strain of being the first in years, after a failed conference, at a time when the world is trying to recover from a pandemic, with production chains affected, economic pressure and a war involving two essential countries for the world trade of commodities. Leaving without an agreement, some agreement, would be shameful and unacceptable.
Delegations knew this, so much so that the conference was extended by nearly 48 hours of virtually uninterrupted negotiations. The faces of several key country negotiators were genuinely exhausted, and this was even a joke in the closing speech of the director-general, stating that the Kazakh ambassador will never want to hear or read the acronym “MC12” again.
decisions
The point is that any deal that needs to be unanimously approved in an organization with 164 members will fail. Even more so those elaborated in these pressured circumstances. the agreement on vaccinesfor example, has been criticized both by developed countries, who claim that it threatens development capacity, and by poorer countries, who claim that the agreement is short-lived and adds little to what already existed for the manufacture of vaccines, in addition to having left out other inputs to fight covid-19.
Over the e-commerce, the “agreement” was basically to maintain the existing moratorium. In other words, they decided to decide later, as any agreement on tariffs on digital services promises to be an earthquake in the world economy. the agreement on food securitystipulating different rules for national regulatory stocks, also came out in a format that displeased rich and poor alike, especially India, one of the countries that best articulates its position as a leader of developing countries in the WTO.
Even the agreement on fishing, the most ambitious, only the second agreement in the organization’s 27 years of existence, which permanently changes the rules of the WTO, is also criticized as unambitious, as it basically recognizes the right to exist “illegal, unreported or irregular”. Just veto your subsidy. Recognizing something that is illegal is contradictory in essence.
The crucial question is whether these agreements, the result of pressure and not very ambitious, will at least serve as a cornerstone for deeper and more elaborate agreements in the near future. In other words, more than the subject of each agreement, their importance lies in the whole and in the task of recovering, at least part, the WTO’s credibility as a forum for issues relevant to the entire international community.
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