WTO must show results on financial crisis, COVID-19 vaccines: Okonjo-Iweala
17 February, 2021
Nigeria's Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, newly selected mind of the Community Trade Firm (WTO), said on Tuesday (Feb 16) she'll push for concrete effects in addressing the dual monetary and overall health crises facing the world.
Her quick goals are to ensure COVID-19 vaccines are produced and distributed worldwide - not simply to rich nations - and to resist the push towards protectionism that worsened through the pandemic, so that free trade might help economic recovery.
"I believe the WTO is too vital that you ensure it is slowed down, paralysed and moribund," she told AFP within an interview. "That isn't right."
She will take over leadership on Mar 1 of an institution that has become weighed down and increasingly defanged, especially by the open up hostility of Donald Trump's administration.
Amid the turmoil - including the US' maneuver that turn off the dispute resolution court in December 2019 over complaints about its handling of disputes with China - her predecessor stepped down in August, a year before his term was up.
Selected simply by the membership on Monday, after All of us President Joe Biden's administration supported her candidacy, Okonjo-Iweala promised to breathe fresh your life into the trade body which usually she says has dropped give attention to helping improve living types of conditions for real people.
"I really believe the WTO can contribute more strongly to a resolution of the COVID-19 pandemic by helping to improve access accessibility and affordability of vaccines to poor countries," she said.
VACCINE PUSH
"It's really in the self-interest of each country to check out everyone vaccinated because you are not safe until everyone is safe."
Some countries, such as India and Southern Africa, have already been pushing for a suspension of trade rules on patents to allow more rapid vaccine rollout.
But instead of get caught found in another squabble among WTO members, Okonjo-Iweala said the organisation could promote a quicker path.
"Instead of hanging out arguing in those we should seem at what the personal sector is doing" with licensing agreements, to permit vaccines to be stated in multiple countries - something she noted AstraZeneca already did in India.
"The individual sector has recently looked for a remedy because they want to be part of reaching poor countries and the indegent," she said.
In addition, the WTO must work to defend against the trend towards export constraints for medical devices and therapeutics, along with the possibility of limitations on the vaccines themselves.
While it is natural for politicians to help their own countries first, she warned that supply chains are tightly linked and cannot be quickly disentangled to create all-domestic production.
TRADE NEGOTIATORS JUST Desire TO WIN
The MIT-trained economist, who served as Nigeria's first woman and longest-serving finance minister, who is a US citizen, is adamant the WTO must go back to its original function of helping countries to provide better living standards to their people.
"It's about creating work, decent work for people. It's about ... bettering lives," she said.
"There is definitely a role for trade to take up in the recovery" from the COVID-19 economic crisis.
Even prior to the pandemic sparked a worldwide recession, the organisation had shed sight of that aim, she said, lamenting the exemplory case of the negotiations above a fisheries subsidies arrangement that has dragged on for just two decades.
"This cannot go on. We must take it to a summary. We can't afford to fail upon this."
The talks, which try to end subsidies that result in overfishing, failed to yield an agreement by the end-2020 deadline.
She blamed a number of the calcification on the dominance of negotiators, which she called an "Achilles' heel" of the WTO.
"Geneva is filled with negotiating experts but the problems own not been solved, they've gotten worse," she explained. "For them it's about winning - or not really losing - and so they stalemate each other."
The WTO requirements "something entirely different" to carefully turn things around, she said, rejecting criticism from some sectors that she lacks trade experience.
"You will need strong political abilities, you need the opportunity to manoeuvre," she said, adding that she may serve as a bridge between developed and growing nations, pulling on her behalf 25-year job at the World Lender as well.
She also intends to push to program the pandemic-delayed WTO ministerial meeting by the finish of this year to get started on that may allow her to spark movement on critical issues.
FIRST WOMAN, AGAIN
Okonjo-Iweala will once more be the first female in a key leadership role, overtaking the WTO for a term that works through Aug 31, 2025, but is renewable.
She agreed it was a challenging, thankless job, but said that produce her a lot more passionate to show results, in order that in future no one can query placing a female in the role.
"That means I want people to aid me even extra. I need more cooperation," she said.
Source: www.channelnewsasia.com