The Secretary for International Economic Relations, Cecilia Todesca Bocco, participates in Geneva, Switzerland, in the twelfth Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO), a meeting that was originally supposed to take place in 2020 but that It was postponed twice due to the Covid19 pandemic.
In this framework, Argentina together with the other members of the WTO will seek to achieve consensus to adopt decisions and agreements on fisheries subsidies, agricultural trade, response to the pandemic, and electronic commerceamong other topics.
In the plenary session on the “State of the Multilateral Trading System”, which took place this Sunday, Todesca Bocco said that “when the WTO was created, development was a central part of our objectives. We believe we need to reinvigorate this goal to reduce barriers to trade, especially regarding the long-delayed agricultural trade reform.”
concern about fishing
The possibility of reaching a 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 that “Argentina has been suffering the consequences of the subsidies granted to the large fleets that fish without control in the area adjacent to our Exclusive Economic Zone. We hope that all members will show flexibility to reach agreement.”
Regarding the WTO’s response to the pandemic that the ministers will address during the conference, the Argentine official 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 diagnoses.”
This morning, Todesca Bocco held a bilateral meeting with his counterpart from Chile, José Miguel Ahumadain order to review the topics of 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 agro-exporting countries that account for more than 25% of world agricultural exports, adopted a Ministerial Declaration, which reaffirms the need to reform the agricultural trade system, paying special attention to to the distorting domestic aid granted by many countries in the form of subsidies that negatively impact food prices and the environment.
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”.
