WTO Trade Negotiations Committee 2023: UK statement
UK Ambassador to the WTO in Geneva, Simon Manley, spoke on subjects, including the 13th Ministerial Conference, at the Trade Negotiations Committee.
Thank you very much and best wishes to the Colombia delegation for their Independence Day. Thank you very much to Anabel and Didier for all your contributions over so many years to this organisation. We are now all intrigued as to what Didier is really going to do; what is the project to which he is going to be released to say everything he has been meaning to say for years! Thank you also to the DG [Director General] for setting the scene so well this morning.
I’ll start with where we want to finish, and think where we want to be in Abu Dhabi next February/early March. We know about some of the issues, not only within the organisation, but also outside which will impact our Ministers’ views and their expectations as they come to Abu Dhabi.
We know that, sadly, we are going to be in a crisis of food insecurity, which has, to be honest, been worsened this week by Russia’s withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative and the subsequent threats to civilian shipping in and around Ukraine.
We know that we are going to be in an environmental crisis; probably the hottest year on record. We will be meeting in Abu Dhabi on the back of COP28.
We know that we are going to be meeting at a time of economic uncertainty for so many of the Members of this organisation.
So we need to think about the expectations of our Ministers. And we work our way back from Abu Dhabi in a way that is purposeful, and thank you [DG], for setting out so clearly your sense of the process going forward.
The most important thing for us to avoid doing over the coming weeks and months leading up to the Senior Officials Meeting is discussing what our officials should discuss, rather than actually doing the hard work of negotiating with our partners to actually achieve the substantive negotiations that our Ministers and senior officials and, most of all, our businesses and consumers, our workers, are expecting us to be doing.
There will be a couple of things for us to celebrate in Abu Dhabi. That’s a good thing. We know that we will be able to celebrate what we have achieved in the last couple of weeks on the Investment Facilitation for Development. But we have hard work to do over the Autumn with colleagues. We know we all hope to achieve something on Dispute Settlement. It is hard for our Ministers to come to Abu Dhabi and walk away without agreeing something on Dispute Settlement. We would have a hard job, all of us, explaining to our Ministers, our public and our media, if we were not able to achieve something.
I was very struck by the comments by the Africa Group, presented by Cameroon, to agree something on food security which is actually meaningful. That might actually make a difference to increasing food security. We have tried to make a modest contribution to that on export restrictions which we think is part of the policy mix; others have other suggestions. I think it is really good that our distinguished Chair of CoASS [Committee of Agriculture in Special Session] is now equipped with so many proposals on the table that we can really look at in detail.
We need to come away from Abu Dhabi with real progress on fisheries. First of all, we have to ratify the agreement and provide support for the implementation. We are certainly on the case, if not quite as swiftly as some of us might wish. Let me pay tribute to the Chair of the fisheries negotiations as to the way in which they are being dealt with. As he kindly said, we have put down a proposal today that tries to capture some of the really useful ideas that a whole number of delegations have made in those first weeks. But of course there is some hard work to be done in the Autumn in those fisheries negotiations.
E-commerce is really important for a number of reasons. A number of us were at the JAG (Joint Advisory Group of the International Trade Centre) and I was struck by how vital digital trade is to the work they do to enable MSMEs [Micro, Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises] in the developing world to reap the benefits of global trade. I do think that it is incumbent upon us to ensure that we are enabling digital trade, not disabling it. It plays a really important role.
Similarly, an agreement on LDC [Least Developed Country] graduation is important and we need to do the hard work on that over the coming weeks to get a deal on that. Similarly we need to sort the long-term future of the Enhanced Integrated Framework. My delegation is on the case with recipients and donors.
Those are all decisions, one way or another, that we need to take by Abu Dhabi. But we also know we need to set an agenda for ourselves for the years ahead. We have a lot of work where we should have made more progress. There are a number of issues where we need to be doing more; where they are not sufficiently on our agenda. We need to be thinking ahead for an organisation in the 2020s, and looking ahead to the 2030s. That agenda that you have set out DG; as trade being green and inclusive, services that are digital. We need to equip ourselves for that. We need to ensure that gets done. So there is a lot of work to do. We need real clarity on how are going to do that.
We need to come back from our summer holidays in September, and as others have said, there is not much time. Not a lot of meetings, either formal meetings, or GC [General Councils] or Senior Official Meeting.
So less discussion about discussion and more negotiation about how we can bring ourselves closer to substantive agreements, in what we hope, will be a successful MC13 [13th Ministerial Conference] in Abu Dhabi.