COVID-19 VACCINE, FISHERIES AGREEMENTS CLOSE A ‘ROLLER COASTER’ MEETING OF WTO

Members of the World Trade Organization announced several agreements Friday at the close of their first in-person ministerial conference in four years, pledging to rein in harmful government policies that have encouraged overfishing and relax some controls on intellectual property in an effort to make coronavirus vaccines more widely available.

The agreements were hard fought, coming after several long nights of talks and extended periods when it appeared that the meeting would yield no major deals at all. Indeed, although the parties were able to reach a compromise on vaccine technology, the divide remained so deep that both sides criticized the outcome.

“It was like a roller coaster, but in the end we got there,” Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director-general of the World Trade Organization, said in Geneva after the group’s members approved the final package of agreements.

The deals were an important success for an organization that has come under fire for being unwieldy, bureaucratic and mired in disagreement. But several government officials, business leaders and trade experts who descended on the trade body’s headquarters this week described the agreements as the bare minimum and said the trade organization, while still operational, was hardly thriving.

Wendy Cutler, a vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute and a former trade negotiator, wrote in an email that the deals, “when packaged together, are enough to claim success but by no means suggest that the WTO has turned a corner.”

Ministers ended up stripping out some of the most meaningful elements of a deal to combat harmful subsidies for fishers that have depleted global fish stocks, Cutler said, and the pandemic response was “too little, too late.”

To address the growing food crisis around the world, the group’s members made a mutual declaration to encourage trade in food and try to avoid export bans that are exacerbating shortages.

One of the trade body’s biggest accomplishments was reaching an agreement to help protect global fishing stocks that has been under negotiation for the past two decades. The agreement would create a global framework for sharing information and limiting subsidies for illegal and unregulated fishing operations, as well as for vessels that are depleting overfished stocks or operating on the unregulated high seas.