Low expectations from WTO Ministerial

IF the WTO's 11th Ministerial Conference did not exist, there would be little reason to invent it. The two-yearly cycle of Ministerials prescribed in the WTO's founding agreement has helped to raise expectations of concrete results each time, with the accompanying risk of high-profile failure. The last two Ministerials, at Bali in 2013 and Nairobi in 2015, achieved a degree of success by salvaging elements of the shipwrecked Doha Development Agenda that were still serviceable, trade facilitation and the prohibition of agricultural export Subsidies. However,there are no such useful items to hand this time. The scope for success is correspondingly more limited and the risks are that much greater.

The preparatory process in Geneva has narrowed the range of issues, but not the divergences that bedevil them. Some, like trade and environment, intellectual property, industrial tariffs and anti-dumping rules, have effectively been put in the freezer. In agriculture, the Ministerial might at most agree on the Indian public stockholding issue and - hopefully - the Singaporean initiative on export restrictions. The major negotiating subjects like trade-distorting domestic subsidies to agriculture or the tariff barriers that persist in the sector are in the too-hard tray. In services the one possible area for progress, domestic regulation, has stalled. In the so-called development area, a number of proposals to expand special and differential treatment for developing countries remain as far from agreement as they have been for nearly 20 years. Meaningful work in the WTO on key current and future issues like investment and electronic commerce remains blocked. And, though it is not formally on the Ministerial agenda, the US refusal to allow new appointments to the appellate body threatens the dispute settlement system and will inevitably overshadow the meeting.

One issue that cries out for action at Buenos Aires is the subsidisation of fishing that imperils the sustainability of fish stocks. Prohibiting such subsidies, including those that encourage illegal and unreported fishing, by 2020 is part of UN Sustainable Development Goal 14. This can only be done effectively through a multilateral agreement in the WTO. Fishery subsidies have been a part of the WTO negotiating agenda from the start of the Doha Round, but these negotiations have taken on increased urgency with growing recognition of the crisis of the world's oceans. It is a case where work in the WTO is supported by NGOs and civil society as well as by political endorsement at the highest level.