India drives landmark WTO deal on subsidies, vax waiver

NEW DELHI: The 164 members of World Trade Organisation (WTO) approved a series of agreements, including a temporary and limited patent waiver for Covid-19 vaccines, an emergency response to the food crisis, a commitment to limit overfishing, and reforms in WTO’S functioning with some concessions for developing countries on the back of some hard talk by India.

The agreements, reached early on Friday, well into overtime after the talks originally expected to end on Wednesday were extended, are the first arrived at WTO in almost nine years, and come even as questions were beginning to be raised about the relevance of the body in a world where countries seem to prefer dealing bilaterally with each other.

“There is not one issue on which we need to return to India with any kind of worry,” commerce minister Piyush Goyal said, adding that the meeting had made progress on issues “pending for decades”.

India and other developing countries, however, conceded one of their key demands — discontinuing the moratorium on customs duty on e-commerce during bargaining. The members at the 12th ministerial conference (MC12) extended the moratorium till the next ministerial conference or March 2024, whichever is earlier.

MC12’S decision on a patent waiver for Covid-19 vaccines will allow countries to authorise production of vaccines patented elsewhere without consent, even export these. The decision falls short of India’s demand of Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waivers for all Covid-related therapeutics and diagnostics. “A decision on diagnostics and therapeutics would be taken in six months. There would be faster pandemic response in future and there would be fewer trade barriers in pandemics,” the Indian commerce ministry said in a statement.

On the issue of food security, the outcome focussed on making food available in developing countries while working towards increasing productivity and production. There will be no export restrictions on World Food Programme purchases for food security in other countries,