The Conference should have been held in 2020 but had to be postponed twice due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“During the week, Argentina, together with the other members of the WTO, will seek to reach consensus to adopt decisions and agreements on subsidies for fishing, agricultural trade, response to the pandemic, and electronic commerce, among other things,” the Foreign Ministry reported.
In the plenary session, on the “State of the Multilateral Trading System”, Todesca Bocco stressed that “at the time the WTO was created, development was a central part of our objectives. We believe that we must reinvigorate this objective in order to reduce barriers to trade , especially regarding the long overdue agricultural trade reform.”
The possibility of reaching an agreement to put an end to fishing subsidies is also the subject of the negotiations taking place in Geneva.
In this regard, the Secretary of International Economic Relations stated: “Argentina has been suffering the consequences of the subsidies granted to large fleets that fish without control in the area adjacent to our Exclusive Economic Zone. We hope that all members show flexibility to reach an agreement.”
On the WTO’s response to the pandemic that the ministers will address during the conference, he conveyed the importance of reaching an agreement that includes intellectual property that “from the beginning we identified as vital to reduce inequity in access to vaccines, treatments and diagnostics.”
In the morning, Todesca Bocco held a bilateral meeting with her pair from Chileand, José Miguel Ahumada, in order to review the issues on the bilateral agenda (green hydrogen, lithium) as well as share views on the multilateral issues that will be discussed at this week’s ministerial meeting. On the margins of the conference, bilateral meetings with Germany and Singapore are also planned.
In addition, Argentina, together with the Cairns Group, which brings together the 19 main agricultural exporting countries that account for more than 25% of world agricultural exports, adopted a Ministerial Declaration.
Said declaration reaffirms the need to reform the agricultural trade system, paying special attention to the distorting domestic aid granted by many countries in the form of subsidies that negatively impact food prices and the environment.
In this sense, in her speech, Todesca Bocco stressed that “we reaffirm the need to promote the delayed reform of the agricultural trade system, which continues to be the most distorted sector, facing unique challenges such as prohibitive tariffs, tariff escalation, high levels of production subsidies, sanitary and phytosanitary restrictions and technical barriers of all kinds that hinder, make more expensive or directly prevent the free flow of agro-industrial products.”
Source: Ambito
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