WTO to Reach an Agreement on COVID-19 Vaccines Waiver

The Director-General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO),  Mrs. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala says that an international agreement on waiving the intellectual property rights for the COVID-19 vaccines was within reach.

Before the global trade body meeting is to commence, Okonjo-Iweala informed Reuters that the keenly debated waiver plan was “within shouting distance.” She also said that an agreement could be reached on fishing subsidies in time for the meeting when 120 trade ministers from around the world will gather at the body’s Geneva headquarters.

She told the news platform that, “If we get one or two deliverables, that will be good. I think we are within shouting distance of that.”

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According to Reuters, a few days before the meeting started, none of the agreements in the three major negotiating areas of agriculture, fish subsidies or intellectual property rights for vaccines had been finalised for ministers to rubber-stamp.

However,  she described it a “hectic” atmosphere in Geneva, the headquarters of the body, where the negotiators had been working late nights and weekends in order to try to resolve the outstanding differences.

Ever since her appointment that was more than a year ago, Okonjo-Iweala, who was also Nigeria’s former minister of finance and chair of the GAVI vaccine alliance board, has prioritised a long-sought deal on a waiver for the intellectual property rights for COVID-19 shots.

Without elaborating on the talks, she noted, “There are some difficult areas we are dealing with but there’s movement.”

The WTO’s biennial meeting has been delayed twice by COVID-19 and was taking place after a near five-year gap against the backdrop of high geopolitical tensions since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the 24th of February, 2022.

Although some of the Western members have refused to negotiate directly with Russia,  Okonjo-Iweala has stated that she was confident that the negotiations could continue through a combination of different meeting sizes.

Referring to next week’s meeting, she says, “You cannot minimise the Russia-Ukraine tensions and crisis. We find methodologies that work and we will use the same approaches for MC12.”