Postponed Ministerial Conference at WTO Means Agreements Will Take Longer, Experts Say

After Switzerland banned flights from Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa, the World Trade Organization had to postpone the 12th Ministerial Conference that was due to start Nov. 30. A news release from Nov. 26 quoted Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala saying that the travel restrictions would have put delegations from Southern Africa at a disadvantage. "She pointed out that many delegations have long maintained that meeting virtually does not offer the kind of interaction necessary for holding complex negotiations on politically sensitive issues," the release said.

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, who was going to Geneva for the conference, tweeted, "The wise, if disappointing, decision to postpone #MC12 is a reminder that we still have much work to do to end the pandemic. The United States will continue working with @WTO members to achieve a multifaceted outcome on trade and health, including an international IP framework, that supports the global pandemic response and puts the WTO in a stronger position to meet the needs of regular people."

Retired trade lawyer Terry Stewart wrote that the postponement will likely mean a slowdown in negotiations on that Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waiver, as well as stalling fisheries subsides negotiations and agriculture negotiations. Stewart said he doesn't believe that a TRIPS waiver will affect supply of the vaccine in the next year, and that vaccine hesitancy in both developed countries and developing countries, vaccine misinformation and the lack of public health capacity in some poor countries are bigger barriers to getting the world vaccinated.

National Foreign Trade Council President Jake Colvin said that decisions on fisheries and all other issues will be pushed out, but in the case of the push to conclude an agreement to end subsidies that lead to overfishing, that could be good. "Maybe for fisheries in particular, you buy a little bit more time to work behind the scenes and lay the groundwork, but one way or another ministers have to come together" to get an agreement, he said in a phone interview Nov. 29. "The nice thing about scheduling the ministerial in person is that it's an action-forcing event," he said. "It would be useful to get that ministerial rescheduled as quickly as it is feasible and appropriate." He said that negotiating remotely is challenging.

"The discussions over this TRIPs waver and IP more generally tend to be theological, and so progress there is always going to be challenging," Colvin said. "From our perspective, we still believe this TRIPS waiver is a solution in search of a problem."

While many observers have talked about the end of binding dispute resolution at the WTO as driving the organization into irrelevancy, Colvin expressed hope that the appellate body could come back after the U.S. is satisfied that reforms to its approach are real. He said that restoring a fully functional dispute settlement system is going to take time even without the postponement, and now will probably take even longer. But he said NFTC is encouraged that Tai said the U.S. is reaching out to other delegations in Geneva on the issue. "Our hope is that work continues and intensifies," he said.