In the early hours of 17 June, after several sleepless nights, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the World Trade Organisation’s preternaturally energetic and resourceful Director-General, stood up and, her voice rising to a crescendo, told exhausted delegates words few had envisaged would be uttered at the end of the organization’s 12th Ministerial conference (MC12): “You stepped up and delivered in every area we have been working on.”
She then listed a package of agreements now known as the Geneva Package — covering, among others, a waiver of intellectual property protections to boost countermeasures against COVID-19, a long-illusory agreement on fisheries subsidies, and a decision addressing food insecurity.
These achievements demonstrated, Ms. Okonjo-Iweala said, that the WTO “is, in fact, capable of responding to the emergencies of our time.”
She hailed a world in which WTO members “can come together, across geopolitical fault lines, to address problems of the global commons, and to reinforce and reinvigorate this institution.” WTO agreements are reached through consensus and are binding on members.
Multilateralism, under attack on multiple fronts, had been given a lifesaving shot in the arm.
The triumphant outcome at MC12 was anything but anticipated. In fact, on 13 June, a day before the conference opened, Nick Dearden, a columnist for Britain’s Guardian newspaper, wrote that delegates arriving for that conference would find the organization in an “existential crisis.”
Amid a pandemic, Mr. Dearden bemoaned, WTO members were still caviling about temporarily waiving property rights of pharmaceutical companies to allow developing countries to produce COVID-19 vaccines; and many of them were still confused about a “common approach” to the growing global food crisis. It was time, he wrote, to “bury” the organization.
Pessimism about the WTO—as about Africa—is nearly always a safe gamble. Only this time pessimism was lost.
Africa’s Benefits
First, there was an agreement about the definition of fish. It was no mean feat. For the past 21 years since fisheries negotiations were launched at Doha, this was one of the fraught issues. Fish, the agreement now states, “means all species of living marine resources, whether processed or not.” The old canard that it includes “aquatic plants” had been quietly jettisoned, almost without notice.
The agreement on fisheries also includes a curb of around $22 billion in annual government subsidies to fishers from wealthy countries who ravage African waters. In other words, this agreement, as well as helping to protect the livelihood of millions of small-scale and artisanal fishing communities in Africa and elsewhere, will also help protect ocean health.
The WTO Director-General writes it is the first such pact in WTO history “with a primarily environmental objective at its core.”Second, the WTO’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waiver decision will contribute to diversifying the vaccine manufacturing capacity of countries, and Africa stands to benefit from it.
Request for the waiver had been submitted by India and South Africa in October 2010, long before Dr. Okonjo-Iweala became Director General. That request triggered a counter proposal from the European Union. Things stalled until she initiated a highly creative process, bringing together India and South Africa (the original proponents), the European Union, and the United States (two key right holders). In five months, the Quad produced an “outcome document” that formed the basis for serious negotiations.
For full disclosure, I facilitated those negotiations as Chair of the TRIPS Council beginning in early May through to the ministerial conference. However, Ms. Okonjo-Iweala and her Deputy, Ms. Anabel Gonzalez, helped guide those negotiations. It was the last decision that was gaveled, at 4:30 am, shortly before the conference was brought to a close.
Work on extending the waiver to cover therapeutics and diagnostics, as mandated by the MC12 Decision, has already started and has to conclude before the end of December this year. In the meantime, the decision will be celebrated in Africa, particularly in countries with the capacity to manufacture vaccines.
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