Comment: on India’s claim that a plurilateral WTO deal is ‘illegal’

SEE ALSO
In General Council India alone opposes investment deal as a WTO agreement
Technical note: types of plurilateral deals and adding them to WTO rules
What the agreement includes
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General Council minutes from this meeting and in general (published a few months after the meeting)
All articles tagged “investment facilitation”
All articles tagged “Plurilaterals”

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By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED JANUARY 12, 2024 | UPDATED MAY 10, 2024

India has circulated a strongly-worded statement prepared for the World Trade Organization’s General Council on December 15, 2023 on why it opposes bringing the new plurilateral agreement on Investment Facilitation for Development (IFD) into the package of WTO rules.

It describes the whole process as “illegal”, without any mandate and against the multilateral WTO framework. Worse, India says, the investment facilitation talks defy a “negative mandate” because of previous consensus decisions against the move.

Why is this important? Two words: WTO reform.

But is that legalistic rejection valid? Some lawyers suggest the argument is political even though it is dressed up as legal.

And “BS” is how one described the claim that negotiations can only be launched in the WTO by a consensus mandate.

Anniversary: 15 years ago an attempt to conclude the Doha Round collapsed

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED JULY 30, 2023 | UPDATED JULY 30, 2023

Saturday July 29 was the 15th anniversary of the day World Trade Organization (WTO) talks broke down, and ministers and officials failed to reach agreement in the Doha Round of negotiations.

“Day 9: Talks collapse despite progress on a list of issues,” says a headline on the WTO website from July 29, 2008.

With Pascal Lamy as director-general, the WTO’s public information on negotiations was more open and less prone to positive spin than it is now. The same goes for Lamy himself.

“It is no use beating around the bush,” he told journalists after speaking to ministers and officials. “This meeting has collapsed. Members have not been able to bridge their differences.”

Whatever happened to the WTO intellectual property negotiations?

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED DECEMBER 4, 2022 | UPDATED DECEMBER 5, 2022

No one noticed when these World Trade Organization negotiations passed their 25th anniversary in early 2022. It was no surprise since WTO members had not even bothered to meet in these talks for a decade, except to appoint a new chair and tidy up other administrative issues.

This is about geographical indications — names associated with specific production areas, such as Champagne wine, Scotch whisky or Caerphilly cheese.

The negotiations are not about protecting the names as such. That was settled in the 1994 intellectual property agreement, although some countries want more.

Rather, these talks are about creating in the WTO a multilateral register for geographical indications for wines and spirits. They are the only officially recognised negotiations on intellectual property in the WTO.

And although they’ve been stuck in limbo since 2012, before that the negotiations did manage to narrow gaps between diametrically opposed positions until they could proceed no further.

The achievement is subtle but significant. The failure of WTO negotiations more broadly prevented members from taking the final steps, although that could not be guaranteed even in a better atmosphere.

WTO agriculture retreat said strong on context but weak on give-and-take

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED OCTOBER 26, 2022 | UPDATED OCTOBER 26, 2022

Monday’s (October 24) “retreat” on agriculture at the World Trade Organization (WTO) was supposed to produce new ideas to help move the stalled farm trade talks forward, but some accounts suggest it was stronger on alerting delegates to new challenges than on developing new negotiating approaches.

This seems to contrast with the brainstorming approach seen in a similar event a fortnight earlier on the fisheries subsidies negotiations (October 10, 2022).

Part of the problem may be that a new chair still has not been appointed for the talks — a problem shared with fisheries subsidies, but apparently not affecting that earlier retreat.

WTO agriculture negotiators face challenge of thinking outside the box(es)

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED OCTOBER 23, 2022 | UPDATED OCTOBER 24, 2022

See also the report on the retreat (published October 26, 2022):
WTO agriculture retreat said strong on context but weak on give-and-take

Brain-storming. Blue sky thinking. Wiping the slate clean. Thinking outside the box. Pick your cliché. World Trade Organization (WTO) members’ ambassadors and agriculture attachés go on a “retreat” tomorrow (October 24) as they try to discover solutions where none have been found for over a decade.

The common impression is that the WTO agriculture negotiations have achieved nothing since they started almost a quarter of a century ago in 2000.

This is partly because after just over a year (in 2001), the talks were rolled into the newly launched and broader Doha Round of WTO negotiations. And now the Doha Round is widely considered to be dead.

Officially the position is more complicated. Some members say the Doha Round is over. Others say the original mandate continues — they refuse to endorse the end of the round.

In practice some parts of the Doha Round have been concluded, such as the Trade Facilitation and Fisheries Subsidies agreements. Other parts are in limbo or the talks have dried up, at least among the full membership. What has faded away is the idea of the talks as one unified package or “single undertaking”.

(An aside here. What almost no one has noticed is that the Trade Negotiations Committee of the WTO membership — with the director-general ex officio in the chair — still meets. This committee was set up specifically within the Doha Round. If the round has ended so should the Trade Negotiations Committee. That would also mean the director-general has no official position in any council or committee of the WTO membership.)

Optimism after WTO ministers meet on fisheries subsidies, despite splits

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED JULY 16, 2021 | UPDATED OCTOBER 10, 2021

Update: As the talks resumed after the summer break and headed for the year-end Ministerial Conference, there was little sign of any compromise on the outstanding issues.

India circulated a new proposal (not public) calling for a 25-year exemption from overfishing subsidy prohibitions for developing countries not engaged in distant water fishing. A number of delegations complained in a session on September 24 that this and other ideas in the proposal “had no element that could help bring about a compromise between members” (Amiti Sen in Hindu Business Line, September 26, 2021).

See more updates, as negotiators go through the chair’s draft line by line almost daily in October 2021.

The two people managing the negotiations on fisheries subsidies in the World Trade Organization (WTO) said they were more confident that an agreement can be reached after 104 ministers or their representatives participated in an online meeting on July 15, 2021.

“This is the closest we have ever come towards reaching an outcome — a high-quality outcome that would contribute to building a sustainable blue economy,” WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala told the ministers at the end of the meeting.

“The prospect for a deal in the autumn ahead of our Ministerial Conference has clearly improved,” she said.

The next Ministerial Conference — the WTO’s top decision-making body — meets from November 30 to December 3 this year

Ambassador Santiago Wills of Colombia, who chairs the negotiations, echoed Okonjo-Iweala. He told a press conference afterwards that he was also more optimistic that an agreement can be reached in time.

But some of the statements that have been made public, with some reading between the lines, show that major differences still remain.

The 20-year saga of the WTO agriculture negotiations

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED MARCH 23, 2020 | UPDATED JUNE 25, 2023

On this day 20 years ago — March 23, 2000 — negotiators met at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva to kick off new agriculture negotiations. Two decades later, the talks struggle weakly on, amid pessimism that any significant breakthrough will be possible in the foreseeable future.

And yet at a modest level, more has been achieved than many people realise. Some will be surprised that the talks are continuing at all.

Introducing the WTO elephant and its dodgy health

By Peter Ungphakorn
DECEMBER 17, 2017 | UPDATED JULY 18, 2019
ORIGINAL PUBLISHED ON UK TRADE FORUM DECEMBER 16, 2017

There’s been an elephant in the room ever since the discussion of Brexit and trade began. Gradually, bits of the animal have become visible, but what we’ve seen has not always been accurate. It’s time to complete the picture, and to understand why the beast isn’t in the best of health.

What WTO leadership means and where the UK would fit in

By Peter Ungphakorn
NOVEMBER 8, 2017 | UPDATED MAY 8, 2019

Too busy to read this longish version? Here are the main points:
How to be a trade champion: A guide for busy politicians

Brexit will allow Britain to lead the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Legatum Institute claims in a new paper published on November 4, 2017.

The paper, “The Brexit Inflection Point: The Pathway to Prosperity”, is new but the claim is not — not entirely.

This EU tariff takes the biscuit

EU customs used to have 27,720 categories of these. Now they have 13,608

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UPDATES
The goods schedule for the EU’s enlargement in 2004 to 25 members (EU–25) was certified and circulated in December 2016. Details are here.

Hallelujah! My wish may be granted. On May 19, 2020, the British government announced it was getting rid of the Meursing table, “allowing us to scrap thousands of unnecessary tariff variations on products — including over 13,000 tariff variations on products like biscuits, waffles, pizzas, quiches, confectionery, and spreads”.

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED AUGUST 18, 2016 | UPDATED MAY 19, 2020

If you make biscuits in Britain and hope to continue to export to the EU after the UK leaves, you’re in for a treat. Ditto if you make bread, cakes, chocolate, breakfast cereals, food preparations or anything similar.