Jakarta-Geneva, 3 December 2021 – In today’s virtual press conference, experts and civil society emphasized that the WTO has no intention of addressing global inequality related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The WTO is now facing nothing short of a legitimacy crisis.
Rachmi Hertanti, a Director of Indonesia for Global Justice (IGJ), remains the leader of WTO member states to concretely take actions on the TRIPS Waiver as the priority to handling the Covid19 pandemic. “The postponement should be a basis for the WTO members to re-thinking the priority actions regarding TRIPS Waiver on the covid19, and stop all negotiations that do not relate with the covid19 and TRIPS Waiver”, Rachmi says.
The WTO MC12th meeting was finally postponed, due to the spread of the new Covid19 variant, called Omicron. However, the WTO has been unable to provide any meaningful response to the COVID-19 pandemic despite severe and worsening inequities in vaccine and treatment access. In fact, rather than agreeing to the TRIPS Waiver immediately, the WTO continues pushing the agenda of developed countries to complete negotiations on several critical issues, such as the WTO Reform, the fisheries subsidies, and the joint statement initiatives (JSI) on E-commerce and Domestic Regulations.
Kinda Mohamadieh, senior researcher with the Third World Network (TWN), explains that under the guise of ‘WTO reform’ certain WTO Members seek to alter the decision making rules at the multilateral organization, undermining the consensus requirement, in order to legitimize the plurilateral negotiations initiatives and to open the door to a long list of new negotiation issues, while those mandates of interest to developing countries, such as agriculture and special and differential treatment, remain unfulfilled. They also seek to undermine special and differential treatment that is the right of developing and least developing countries under the multilateral trading regime, while facilitating the influence of big business on the agenda-setting and negotiations processes in the organization.
“WTO reform should focus on the long standing demands of developing and least developed countries including reviewing and rebalancing existing WTO rules, in order to address the implementation challenges that developing and least-developed countries have been facing and to strengthen and make operational special and differential treatment. The focus ought to be on strengthening the ability of the WTO to deliver on the objective of developing an integrated, more viable multilateral trading system, as set out in the preamble of the Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the WTO”, Kinda underlined.
In the context of the JSI-Ecommerce negotiations, Rashmi Banga, UNCTAD senior economist, explains that it is clear that the intention of developed countries is to push more new issues in the WTO through the Plurilateral Agreements which will erodes the WTO’s foundational principle of multilateralism related to the consensus-based decision making process. There are several critical issues such as the cross-border data flows, moratorium on digital tax, and market access on goods and services.
“To bridge the digital divide it is extremely important for developing countries to preserve their policy space in order to be able to build their digital infrastructure including data infrastructure. Digital rules which are being proposed by the developed countries in the Joint Statement Initiative on E-Commerce can severely restrict the fiscal and regulatory space of the developing countries apart from undermining the multilateral processes,” Rashmi Banga explained.
Furthermore, Adam Wolfenden from PANG, said that currently, the postponement of the WTO MC12th has even become a space for developed countries to lobby developing countries in pushing
hard on the negotiations, to have them continue with a view of concluding in February (or before ). The current text that WTO Members are negotiating does nothing to address the imbalances of all the previous texts. The text fails the mandate provided by Leaders under the sustainable development goal 14.6, which led to The imbalance between the disproportionate burdens falling on developing countries and those with aspirations for domestic fishing fleets.
“Ultimately this text is a win for those who have already used their advantage to build their fleets, develop the capacity to meet the WTO’s notification requirements, and have historically overfished all around the globe. This fails the SDG mandate, sustainability and development”, Adam said.
The press conference is organized by Indonesia for Global Justice (IGJ) and Gerak Lawan Coalition together with international network Our World is Not For Sale (OWINFS) and BothEnds.
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For further information please contact:
Adam Wolfenden, PANG — campaigner@pang.org.fj
Rachmi Hertanti, IGJ — rachmi.hertanti@igj.or.id
Lutfiyah Hanim, TWN — lutfiyah.hanim@gmail.com
Key Documents:
https://www.twn.my/title2/briefing_papers/briefings_MC12.htm
https://twn.my/announcement/UNCTAD%20Re%20Paper%2058_022021.pdf
https://pang.org.fj/off-the-hook-briefing-paper/
https://igj.or.id/g20-member-states-must-commit-to-agreeing-on-the-trips-waiver-in-addressing-global-inequality/?lang=en
https://igj.or.id/pernyataan-sikap-bersama-kelompok-masyarakat-sipil-dan-organisasi-nelayan-terhadap-negosiasi-subsidi-perikanan-di-wto/