The great ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO), postponed several times due to the COVID-19 pandemic, will be held in June on a date yet to be determined, the agency said.
The WTO ministerial meeting, the first since the end of 2017, was initially scheduled for June 2020 in Kazakhstan and had already been postponed after the first cases of COVID-19 in late 2019.
It was rescheduled for the end of 2021, but was postponed at the last moment for health reasons, after the appearance of the omicron variant.
In a meeting held on Tuesday, the president of the General Council of the WTOthe Honduran ambassador Dacio Castilloproposed to the diplomats that the meeting be held in June.
All the conversations of the WTO — from subsidies to overfishing and illegal fishing to agriculture and intellectual property issues related to fighting COVID — are deadlocked.
The CEO of the WTO, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, also hopes to get an agreement on the response to the pandemic. But divisions between countries remain, including the issue of temporarily suspending patents on vaccines and other technologies against COVID-19.
Source: Gestion
Ricardo is a renowned author and journalist, known for his exceptional writing on top-news stories. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he is known for his ability to deliver breaking news and insightful analysis on the most pressing issues of the day.
