The summit of the World Trade Organization (WTO) did publish a final statement but delivered hardly any concrete results.
The final statement obliges all countries to “take steps to make agricultural production and trade more predictable and thus reduce price fluctuations.” However, how this should be achieved will only be determined later within the WTO at follow-up meetings.
The WTO annual meeting initially risked complete failure and had to be extended by two days. At one point, a series of demands from India, which sees itself as the defender of poor farmers and fishers and developing countries, seemed to paralyze the discussions entirely, but a compromise was eventually found, according to trade sources.
In the WTO, all decisions are made unanimously, meaning in effect that each country holds veto power. This was the first time in three years that more than a hundred trade ministers physically gathered due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Under former US President Trump, the WTO achieved little because the US went its own way and did not want to make international agreements.
A concrete outcome in the agricultural sector is that, after three years of negotiations, WTO countries have agreed to lift restrictions on purchasing humanitarian food aid by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).
It was also decided to abolish harmful fisheries subsidies after twenty years of negotiations. The agreement to curb fisheries subsidies is only the second multilateral agreement in the 27-year history of the WTO and is far more ambitious than the first, which aimed to reduce bureaucracy.