Crucial WTO negotiation on access to pandemic-suspended vaccines

The ministers and senior trade officials of the 164 countries that make up the World Trade Organization (WTO) they were left with the packed suitcases after the suspension of the ministerial conference in which they were going to participate next week in Geneva – due to the appearance of a new variant of the coronavirus – and in which a decision was expected to favor more equitable access to vaccines against Covid-19.

Fruitless debates have accumulated in the last year at the WTO around a proposal by India and South Africa to suspend patents (intellectual property rights) that protect inventions related to fighting the pandemic: vaccines, tests, treatments and any other input for the same purpose.

The objective is that these products can be manufactured in a generic version in developing countries, increasing their availability and reducing their price, an idea to which the European Union, Switzerland and the United Kingdom are totally opposed and to which they have proposed an alternative. much more limited and easily controllable.

The rest of the world supports the liberalization of patents related to the pandemic and this initiative even received the support of the United States, although since then it has contributed little to the discussions, preferring to adopt an observer role.

The countries that defend this position and civil society (represented by the NGOs) trusted that the ministerial meeting that has been suspended would give global visibility to these debates and that, under pressure from the moral imperative of facilitating access by the poorest countries to the vaccines, opposing countries will offer concessions.

The WTO ministers conference has paradoxically been the victim of the pandemic for the second time, after a first postponement in 2020 and now the one just announced, which will prolong the status quo not only on the issue of the pandemic, but in another key negotiation that seemed to be able to go ahead: the elimination of subsidies for illegal fishing or those that incur overexploitation practices.

Hours before communicating the decision – discussed in an urgent meeting of ambassadors of all present in Geneva -, the Swiss Government banned all flights from southern Africa and ordered that everyone arriving from South Africa, Hong Kong, Israel and Belgium (territories and countries where the new omicron variant has been detected) had to be quarantined for 10 days, in addition to presenting a negative covid test.

WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said those travel restrictions meant that many ministers and delegates were unable to participate in person in the negotiations, effectively putting them at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the negotiators. that they could have traveled to Geneva.

Since the beginning of the pandemic and until a few months ago, the WTO meetings had to be held virtually, but the general opinion was that this made it impossible to have the interaction that negotiations of this type require, complex and politically sensitive.

“This recommendation has not been easy, but as CEO my priority is the health and safety of all conference participants, that is ministers, delegates and civil society. It is preferable to err on the side of caution, ”said Okongo-Iweala.

“This does not mean that the negotiations should be interrupted, quite the contrary. The delegations in Geneva must be given the necessary power to close the disagreements that persist ”, said the president of the General Council of the WTO (the highest decision-making body between ministerial conferences), the Honduran ambassador, Dacio Castillo.

This invocation will, however, be difficult to address since disagreements on the most important issues, patents and fisheries, no longer require more technical analysis, but rather political will to move forward, an element that only ministers can provide. or deny.

A meeting at such a high official level has not taken place at the WTO since December 2017.