Washington — Members of the World Trade Organization announced several agreements on Friday at the end of their first face-to-face ministerial meeting in four years. Make the coronavirus vaccine more widely available.
The agreement was a fierce battle, after several long nights of discussions and a long period of time when the meeting was unlikely to bring any big deals.
“It looked like a roller coaster, but we finally got there,” said Ngozi Okonjoi Wara, the secretary-general of the World Trade Organization, with group members agreeing.
The deal was an important success for organizations that were awkward, bureaucratic, and plagued by disagreements. However, some government officials, business leaders, and trade experts who landed at the headquarters of trade associations on the shores of Lake Geneva this week explained the deal as a minimum, and the trading organization is still running. But said it was barely prosperous.
“Packaging together is enough to claim success, but it doesn’t suggest that the WTO has been cornered,” said Wendy Cutler, vice president and former trade negotiator at the Institute for Policy Studies of the Asian Association. No, “he wrote in an email.
According to Cutler, ministers will remove some of the most meaningful elements of the deal to combat harmful subsidies to fishermen who have depleted the world’s fish stocks, and the pandemic response is “less.” It’s too late, it’s too late. “
“The results look particularly poor in the light of the serious challenges facing the global economy, from slowing growth to a serious food crisis to climate change,” she said.
To deal with the growing food crisis around the world caused by the pandemic and war in Ukraine, members of the group Mutual declaration Encourage food trade and try to avoid export bans that exacerbate shortages.
The trading organization has also agreed to temporarily extend the ban on taxes or tariffs on e-transmissions, including e-books, movies, or research that may be transmitted digitally across national borders. However, the issue that many companies and some senior government officials argued for unmanageable results was difficult and protracted.
“Ministers spent a whole week trying to prevent the collapse of the e-commerce moratorium, rather than anticipating ways to strengthen the global economy,” said the chairman of the National Foreign Trade Council, which represents major multinational corporations. One Jake Corbin said.
One of the greatest achievements of industry groups is the reaching of an agreement to protect the world’s fishing resources, which has been negotiated for the past 20 years.
According to Pew Charitable Trusts, the government spends $ 22 billion annually on subsidies to fishing fleets, often encouraging industrial fisheries to catch far more fish than sustainable fisheries. increase. The agreement is global to share information and limit subsidies to illegal and unregulated fisheries and vessels operating in unregulated high seas that are depleting overfished stocks. Create a framework.
In the organization’s more than 25 years of history, this transaction was only the second agreement on the adjustment of trade rules signed by all members of the organization. And it was the group’s first agreement centered on environmental and sustainability issues.
Marine advocates have responded in various ways.
Isabel Jarrett, manager of the Pew Charitable Trust’s project to reduce harmful fisheries subsidies, called the agreement “a turning point in addressing one of the major drivers of global overfishing.” ..
“Reducing subsidies that promote overfishing helps restore the health of the fishing industry and its dependent communities,” she said. “The WTO’s new agreement is just one step towards doing that.”
However, others have expressed disappointment. “Our ocean is a big loser today,” said Andrew Sharpless, CEO of Oceana, a non-profit organization focused on marine conservation. “After a 20-year delay, the WTO has once again failed to end subsidy overfishing, this time allowing countries to plunder the world’s oceans.”
As part of the agreement, negotiations will continue with the aim of making recommendations on additional provisions to be considered at next year’s Council of Ministers.
Members of the World Trade Organization also agreed to relax intellectual property rules to allow developing countries to produce patented Covid-19 vaccines under certain circumstances. In a statement, U.S. trade representative Katherine Tai said members of the trading organization “filled the gap, achieved concrete and meaningful results, and delivered the safest and most effective vaccines to those in greatest need. I was able to do it. “
The issue of easing the intellectual property rights of vaccines has become very controversial. It has fought the pharmaceutical industry and developed countries, which are home to their activities, especially in Europe, against civil society organizations and delegations from India and South Africa.
Both parties were able to reach a compromise, but the inequality remained so deep that they both criticized the outcome.
Stephen J. Uble, president and chief executive officer of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said the deal “has lost the world’s population.” Today, the global supply of vaccines is plentiful, and the agreement has rarely addressed “real issues affecting public health,” such as supply chain bottlenecks and border tariffs on medicines.
Lori Wallach, director of the American Economic Liberties Project’s Rethink Trade program, called the results “dangerous public health failures” and “sneaky indications of the end of multilateralism,” more in some developed countries and pharmaceutical companies. More than 100 countries to improve access to medicines that have blocked the will.The agreement did not loosen Intellectual property rights for treatment or treatment, as civil society groups have hoped.
The division between rich and poor countries, and between large corporations and groups of civil society, was evident in other negotiations, which also overlapped with the geopolitical challenges of the global epidemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. ..
The World Trade Organization required agreement from all 164 member states to reach an agreement, and India has emerged as a significant obstacle in several negotiations, including e-commerce obligations and fishery subsidies.
Corbin said the unanimous consensus requirement imposed severe restrictions on the ability of industry groups to produce meaningful results. “This system is set up to reward hostages and malice,” he said.
Katrin Einhorn When Cheryl Gay Stolberg Report that contributed.
