1.6.6. Bruno Aires conference

The WTO’s Eleventh Ministerial Conference in Nairobi in 2017. Its key takeaways are:

♤ Fishery subsidies: Member nations committed to securing a deal on fisheries subsidies for prohibiting subsidies for illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing by the end of 2019. They also committed to improving the reporting of existing fisheries subsidy programmes.

♤ Public Stockholding – There was no outcome on public stockholding for food security purposes or on other agriculture issues. As a result, India's food security programmes and its current public distribution system will not be impacted. However, to use the peace clause, India has to give information to WTO about the size of its food subsidy bill till last year.

♤ E-commerce – While there was a strong push by some countries to initiate negotiations on this issue, this was resisted by India. The consensus decision was to continue discussions in a non-negotiating mode — a vindication of India’s stand.

♤ Non-trade issues – Developed nations strived to bring into the discussions a stream of issues from rules for small and medium enterprises to gender rights in global trade, which India has categorized as nontrade issues.

♤ Further, no agreement was reached on special safeguard mechanism (SSM) for developing countries to curb unforeseen surges in imports of agricultural products or the special and differential treatment of developing countries.

1.7. Threats to WTO

Increased bilateral and multilateral preferential trade agreements indeed pose existential threat to WTO. Also the biggest success of WTO i.e. Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) has been undermined by the US. When Qatar instituted a dispute against Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, the US categorically stated that it will not support WTO panels and the appellate body.

Further, WTO seems to be weakened by the frivolous steps taken by US such as The US steel and aluminum measures in March 2018 on frivolous grounds of national security was a violation of the WTO spirit as well as US lack of interest in pursuing the WTO’s agreed Doha agenda is evident by not allowing the appointment of an Appellate Body judges leading to strangulation the WTO’s dispute panel.