The Director-General of the World Trade Organization, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, at the closing ceremony of the 12th Ministerial Conference of the WTO (MC12) on June 17, said: “The outcomes demonstrate that the WTO is, in fact, capable of responding to the emergencies of our time.” Let us see if MC12 outcomes justify her remarks. We take important issues by turn.

One, easing the pain of the pandemic: Acting as the Good Samaritans, India and South Africa in October 2020 proposed that the WTO temporarily waive intellectual property protection on vaccines, therapeutics, and other health technologies needed to fight the coronavirus pandemic. The idea was to enable every country to make vaccines without fearing litigation by patent holders. Let us look at the MC12 outcome.

The MC12 decision permits developing countries to make and export vaccines without the patent holder’s consent. But this flexibility comes with many onerous conditions, more complex than those in the existing TRIPS agreement and hence may remain unimplemented.

The MC12 text also mentions that developing countries with the capacity to manufacture Covid-19 vaccines are encouraged to “make a binding commitment not to avail themselves of this waiver”. Is this strange? Moreover, the decision covers only vaccines. The diagnostic and therapeutic goods, part of the original proposal, has been pushed for a later date.

The Indian and South African proposal was backed by more than 100 countries, and many institutions like the World Health Organization. But the WTO chose to side with the pharma lobby. An unworkable TRIPS waiver demonstrates that developing countries have no power at the WTO. The world expected the WTO to act on the right side of the pandemic history.

Two, agreement on fisheries: Just five countries — China, the EU, the US, South Korea and Japan — provide about 60 per cent of the total $35 billion worldwide subsidies. Their large industrial fleets catch fish on different continents thousands of miles away from home.

In contrast, for most developing countries (except China), fishery is a livelihood issue. Developing countries supported negotiations but expected long transition periods ranging up to 25 years. This was not agreed upon. Here are a few details.

Fishery negotiations covered fish and other marine life at sea but not river fish or aquaculture. The agreement was reached on two subject categories: Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing and overfished stocks. The third category, overfishing and overcapacity, will be negotiated later. The table captures the MC12 outcome on fisheries.

Also, subsidies to IUU are banned, not the IUU fishing. While developed countries may go scot-free, they have resources and technology to catch IUU activities in developing countries through surveys and research. Papers already talk about IUU fishing in the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal but there is no mention of other vast areas of ocean where large industrial fishing fleets ply.

The selective reporting in these papers must raise an alarm for India and it will do well to put in place an effective system and develop information network on the happenings at sea to avoid selective targeting.

Three, agriculture and food security: In the ministerial declaration on emergency response to food security, countries agreed to exempt supplies meant for the World Food Programme from export restrictions. India initially opposed this proposal as it did not want to agree to provide blanket permission to such supplies, considering it has to take care of its large, mostly poor population.

For India, securing the permanent solution to the issue of public stockholding (PSH) was the priority. However, there is no mention of this issue in the declaration on food insecurity.

Also, India’s proposal for allowing the export of foodgrains from public stocks through government-to-government (G2G) transitions does not find mention in the final documents. India has to battle hard in the next ministerial to get a solution for PSH and G2G sales issues.

Four, WTO reforms: Restoring the functioning of the dispute settlement system and appellate body are the most urgent reforms for all WTO members. The MC12 outcome document postpones this to the next meeting after two years.

Five, the extension of the moratorium on e-commerce: WTO members agreed to maintain the current practice of not imposing customs duties on electro,nic transmissions for another two years.

India, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Indonesia had initially resisted extending the moratorium on the grounds of losing revenue but later agreed. From Netflix to Google, every digital firm was watching the outcome. India can leverage the issue in the next meetings to get outcomes on agriculture and other matters.

Six, decisive shift to new non-trade issues: The three-page outcome document mentions environment five times and sustainable development six times. These are important, but non-trade, issues and are dealt in other global agencies. This shows a decisive shift of the WTO to non-trade issues of business interest to developed countries.

In sum, the outcome on most issues was low in content and high on legalese and rhetoric. The WTO continues to serve the interests of developed countries at the expense of everyone else. It needs to be more representative to justify its name.

The writer was an Indian Trade Services officer

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