The postponement of this week’s World Trade Organization ministerial meeting almost guarantees that fisheries subsidies and the wider spread of the COVID-19 vaccine will be in a stalemate for several months.
Before the party, people’s expectations for the new agreement were already low. Due to the Omicron variant, new travel restrictions in Switzerland meant that many planned face-to-face meetings could not be held. The party was closed late on Friday (November 26). put off.
The WTO proposed on Monday that, if conditions permit, a ministerial meeting will be held in the first week of March 2022. However, no new date has been determined.
Dmitry Grozoubinski, executive director of the Geneva Trade Platform Think Tank, said that ministerial meetings are the key to any agreement because they bring together political decision makers and set deadlines.
“This is a major blow. The gap in issues such as the fisheries and the intellectual property part of COVID-19 is a political gap. This is not a fatal blow because they do plan to reconvene,” he said.
WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Ivera said that negotiations should not be stopped and that the Geneva delegations should narrow their differences as much as possible.
“This new variant reminds us again that the work we undertake is urgent,” she said.
The delegation did start work on Monday to discuss the proposal by India and South Africa to waive intellectual property (IP) rights for COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, as well as the EU’s counter-proposal on the use of flexibilities in existing WTO rules.
The medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières stated that the world cannot waste more time and millions of lives are at risk.
“We call on countries that oppose and dilute this exemption today to stop delaying tactics and take urgent measures to adopt a full exemption,” it said.
Omicron’s findings support one of the arguments of supporters of the exemption that failure to provide vaccines to poorer countries increases the risk of potentially dangerous new variants of the coronavirus.
US President Joe Biden reiterated his belief in abandoning vaccine intellectual property protection, saying that the news of the new variant has increased the importance of acting quickly.
