WTO farm talks seek fresh thinking without losing everything

PREVIOUS STORIES
Seven talking points after the WTO’s 2024 Ministerial Conference
Chair’s draft pushes WTO farm talks deadlines back to next conference
‘Mission impossible’ and ‘mission essential’ collide in WTO farm talks
See also all stories on this topic (tagged “agriculture negotiations”)

---

Posted by Peter Ungphakorn
APRIL 21, 2024 | UPDATED APRIL 21, 2024

Negotiators in the World Trade Organization’s farm talks broadly agree that a new approach is needed to revive the talks after they failed completely at the Abu Dhabi Ministerial Conference, but they differ on whether to tackle the entire subject or focus on priority areas.

On the table in the April 16, 2024 meeting was a proposal from Brazil for a decision by the General Council in July. This would effectively turn the scrapped draft from Abu Dhabi into a postponed decision, while removing the no longer available option of agreeing on over-the-limit subsidies in food stockpiling (“PSH”) at the Ministerial Conference.

The WTO’s General Council has the power to take decisions on behalf of its Ministerial Conferences.

In a separate process, WTO members also agreed on a non-binding document on food security, including export restrictions, also a binned agricultural text in Abu Dhabi.

Chair’s draft pushes WTO farm talks deadlines back to next conference

PREVIOUS STORY
‘Mission impossible’ and ‘mission essential’ collide in WTO farm talks

SEE ALSO
WTO ministers’ meeting — no interaction, no movement, just speeches
Texts: state of play in WTO farm talks and the crisis-meeting invitation
and all stories on this topic (tagged “food stockholding”)

---

UPDATE: The draft prepared for the February 26–29, 2024 Ministerial Conference was circulated on February 16. It still pushed the deadlines back to the next conference, but with options throughout: members “shall” agree by then or they “agree to work towards” the target.

The deadlock remained over whether price support in food security stockpiling (PSH) should be a stand-alone decision at this conference or resolved with all the other topics by the next one.

See the full update below

---

Posted by Peter Ungphakorn
FEBRUARY 5, 2024 | UPDATED FEBRUARY 18, 2024

World Trade Organization agriculture negotiators are spending the first two weeks of February scrutinising a draft text for the WTO’s upcoming Ministerial Conference.

In a meeting on January 30, 2024 they accepted the draft as the document to work on for the February 26–29 conference in Abu Dhabi — the WTO’s 13th Ministerial Conference, called “MC13” by insiders.

It was prepared by the talks’ chair, Ambassador Alparslan Acarsoy of Türkiye.

The 5-page draft is detailed, but for most issues it postpones any resolution until the Ministerial Conference after Abu Dhabi — “MC14” — normally within two years.

However, one issue still threatens to sink the whole effort. This is about finding a long-term solution for the present short term fix for over-the-limit subsidies used to buy into food security stocks (explained here).

Members disagree on whether this should be a single-issue decision or part of a package covering the whole of domestic support. (More below.)

A WTO website news story summarises its content in detail.

‘Mission impossible’ and ‘mission essential’ collide in WTO farm talks

SEE ALSO
WTO ministers’ meeting — no interaction, no movement, just speeches
Texts: state of play in WTO farm talks and the crisis-meeting invitation
and all stories on this topic (tagged “food stockholding”)

---

Posted by Peter Ungphakorn
JANUARY 17, 2024 | UPDATED JANUARY 18, 2024

The US, EU and the majority of the Cairns Group told fellow agriculture negotiators at the World Trade Organization yesterday (January 16) that a stand-alone decision on relaxing rules on food security stocks procured with higher than permitted subsidies will not be possible at next month’s WTO Ministerial Conference.

The writing had been on the wall for some time. In this meeting, according to sources, the US seems to have taken the lead, in declaring that deep divisions among members cannot be resolved and therefore a consensus decision at the Abu Dhabi conference will be impossible.

The US reaction is said to have come after India sought to “refresh members’ memory” by recalling mandates from previous years.

The purpose for India and its allies would be to find a permanent solution to replace the present temporary fix for when developing countries exceed their domestic support entitlements through purchases into food security stocks at subsidised prices.

Sceptics delay proposal for more WTO documents to be made public

See also
WTO reform: 39 members call for more information to be made public
How wide should the WTO window be set? 2 External transparency

---

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED DECEMBER 15, 2023 | UPDATED DECEMBER 15, 2023

India, China and Antigua and Barbuda told the last meeting of the year of the World Trade Organization’s General Council on December 14, 2023, that they needed more time to discuss a proposal for more public transparency with WTO documents, effectively kicking the issue down the road.

The proposal has been resubmitted adding the US as a new sponsor — the US was already calling for meeting agendas to be made public as long ago as July 1998. (The updated text is below. The original version is from July.)

The 39 sponsors — Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, the EU (and its 27 members), New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, Taiwan, the UK and the US — want many important documents to be released to the public immediately, or faster than at present, some of them currently never made public.

We see no compelling reason why these must be kept restricted as they are formal statements explaining the state of our work
— the proposal’s sponsors, comment A2

They include meeting agendas and notes added to the agenda headings, and a wide range of reports by the WTO Secretariat — “We see no reason why [normal] official documents prepared by the Secretariat should ever be restricted”.

They also include documents that a member may want to be released related to its own individual commitments to open up their markets, currently always secret. These are officially called “schedules” of commitments.

WTO ministers’ meeting — no interaction, no movement, just speeches

SEE ALSO
Ministers preparing for WTO crisis meeting told they need to compromise and
Texts: state of play in WTO farm talks and the crisis-meeting invitation

---

Posted by Peter Ungphakorn
DECEMBER 1, 2023 | UPDATED DECEMBER 5, 2023

The supposed “crisis” meeting of about 25 World Trade Organization ministers on November 28, 2023 showed no sign of breaking the deadlock in the WTO agriculture negotiations.

With barely two working months to go members now face the real risk of no outcome at all on agriculture at the February 2024 Ministerial Conference.

According to sources, the three-hour online meeting consisted only of a series of prepared statements echoing what delegations have been saying in the negotiations. No minister made any attempt even to edge towards compromise, even though they had been urged to do so before the meeting.

Nor did the chair attempt to encourage a dialogue, or to explore possible compromises. The presiding minister was UAE Foreign Trade Minister Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi, who will chair the Abu Dhabi Ministerial Conference.

WTO reform: 39 members call for more information to be made public

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED JULY 31, 2023 | UPDATED DECEMBER 15, 2023

The last General Council meeting before the 2023 summer break at the World Trade Organization (WTO), on July 24 and 25, received several documents on WTO reform. Some of them deal with public information and transparency — including making more documents available to the public, and quicker — and deserve more attention.

(Jump to the section on the proposal about derestricting documents, including the full text)

Why is this important? Here’s an example.

One of the most recent developments in the WTO is agreement on an almost-final text among participants negotiating new rules on investment. The deal would streamline investment procedures for the benefit of developing countries — Investment Facilitation for Development.

Ask anyone involved or with privileged information and they will speak glowingly about how useful this is going to be, such as in this session of the WTO Public Forum on September 15, 2023, or this article by ex-WTO Deputy Director-General Alan Wolff.

But the world at large has to take their word for it because the text is still secret. Ask “Why is it secret?” and the answer is “because it’s not completely final”.

The world at large has to take their word for it because the text is still secret