Azusa Nakanishi/Yomiuri Shimbun via AP Images
The venue for the 13th WTO Ministerial Conference held in Abu Dhabi
The WTO, dating to 1995, is a dinosaur. It was created in an era when American banks and corporations defined free trade as a set of global rules against the regulation of capitalism, and U.S. administrations willingly did their bidding.
At this session, meeting in Abu Dhabi, three major issues were on the table. None were resolved.
One was the very real problem of overfishing. Several proposals sensibly called for limits on fishing subsidies. But the final draft text included carve-outs for giant factory fishing fleets, and this was blocked by a group of Third World nations.
A second issue was the perennial one of subsidized trade in agriculture. Keeping people from starving supposedly distorts trade. Here again, nations of the Global South led by India blocked the proposed agribusiness-led deal, by insisting that nations have the right to use public food stockholding for food security purposes.
A third issue was whether the U.S. would permit a return to mandatory dispute resolution procedures, in which the WTO’s supreme court, known as the Appellate Body, is beset with conflicts of interest. The U.S. did not relent and continues to block new appointments to the Appellate Body, which denies it a quorum.
Corporate lobbyists and their enablers did gain two victories. They won a two-year moratorium on taxes on digital trade. And Big Pharma successfully enlisted the support of the U.S., the U.K., and Switzerland to block expansion of the waiver of WTO intellectual-property protections known as TRIPS, to facilitate production and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics. Shame on the U.S.
For the most part, however, that was an exception. The Biden administration has generally kept its commitment to change course, so that nations have the right to pursue their own national economic and social strategies, not impeded by global rules created by and for corporations. If the WTO withers on the vine, so much the better.
The usual suspects deplored the outcome. A report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies aptly warned, “The capacity for one member to poison the system is becoming an untenable feature of the WTO and is set to further derail substantive progress in upcoming talks.”
Politico wrote: “Last week’s World Trade Organization summit was almost a complete bust, and the Biden administration seems perfectly fine with that.” But later in the piece, the writer admitted: “So while the latest gathering in Abu Dhabi represented another low point for the world trade body, it also validated, in many ways, the administration’s campaign pitch to workers and industry that it’s time to forge a new global consensus on trade—one that prioritizes labor rights and national security rather than breaking down barriers to global commerce.”
Amen to that.
Issues like overfishing and the right balance between patent rights and global public health do need to be resolved. Before the WTO, they were resolved by treaties, and they can be again.
