The new Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Nigerian Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, officially took office on Monday, March 1, and heads her first General Council of the institution, which ends on Tuesday.
“I am entering one of the most important institutions in the world and we have a lot of work to do. I feel ready to leave, “said the new boss, before informing that” there is a meeting of the General Council “during which she” hopes to be able to listen and see what the delegations have to say, what the ambassadors have to say on the main topics and to exchange ”with them.
On the meeting’s agenda are several topics including the Covid-19 pandemic and the fisheries agreement. Regarding the coronavirus, a proposal made by India and South Africa, concerning the manufacture of vaccines, still divides member countries.
These two states are asking for a temporary exemption from intellectual property rights to allow countries to produce a vaccine without worrying about patents, until “the majority of the world’s population is immunized.”
Regarding fisheries, negotiations on subsidies are still ongoing. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said he hoped that the talks will be finalized at the present meeting in order to leave “to the twelfth ministerial meeting the care of concluding the modalities of implementation”. It is the will of the Director-General that the negotiations be completed before the middle of this year.
The organization’s 12th Ministerial Conference (MC12), attended by trade ministers and other senior officials from the organization’s 164 members, will be held “the week of November 29, 2021” in Geneva.
As a reminder, the negotiations on fisheries subsidies within the framework of the WTO were launched in 2001. At the ministerial conference (CM11) in Buenos Aires, held in 2017, the ministers agreed on a work program leading to the conclusion of negotiations with a view to adopting, at the next Ministerial Conference, an agreement on fisheries subsidies that gives effect to the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14.6.
SDG 14.6, which is part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted by all UN member states in 2015, aims “by 2020, (to) ban fisheries subsidies that contribute overcapacity and overfishing, eliminate those that promote illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and refrain from granting new ones, knowing that the granting of effective and appropriate special and differential treatment to developing countries development and least developed countries must be an integral part of the negotiations on fisheries subsidies within the framework of the WTO ”.
For Okonjo-Iweala, the first woman and first African Director General of the WTO, the success of MC12 is a “‘top priority” for all WTO members. This meeting should allow, according to her, to “reach an agreement on certain urgent questions and to develop our work program for others”.
By OMA Newsletter N ° 170 of 02/03/2021
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