Trade ministers in Geneva later this month will prepare a work plan on pandemic remedies like enhanced preparedness, response, and resilience to help members of the World Trade Organisations (WTO) out of the crisis by making necessary supplies available.
Trade ministers in Geneva later this month will prepare a work plan on pandemic remedies like enhanced preparedness, response, and resilience to help members of the World Trade Organisations (WTO) out of the crisis.
The work plan will address issues related to crisis response, preparedness and resilience, and focus on topics discussed in the ministerial declaration, officials said in Dhaka.
Issues like trade facilitation, export restrictions, regulatory coherence, transparency and monitoring, and scaling-up of production and distribution of essential goods and services will be included in the work plan.
The WTO council for trade in goods, the trade-policy review body, the council for trade in services and their relevant subsidiary bodies will continue, or initiate within three months, focused discussions on lessons learned and challenges encountered in responding to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
And they will also develop guidelines or codes of best practices to guide members' trade response to the pandemic, and consider their applicability to future pandemics, and other global crises.
The work plan will focus enhancing transparency, promoting greater vaccine production and equitable distribution, addressing supply-chain vulnerabilities, improving regulatory cooperation, and enhancing regulatory compatibility.
Also, accelerated implementation of the trade-facilitation agreement and best practices in implementation, evaluating export restrictions and prohibitions, considering trade in services and its contribution to pandemic preparedness and resilience will get importance.
According to a draft document, the trade ministers are "concerned that export restrictions and prohibitions have affected the availability of, and access by governments and the private sector to, essential Covid-19 products and inputs needed to manufacture them".
They will, in the meeting, pledge to exercise utmost restraint in the imposition of any new export restrictions and prohibitions and have recourse to export restrictions and prohibitions "only as a last resort".
The ministers will also vow "to review regularly all existing export restrictions and prohibitions on essential Covid-19 products with a view to assessing their continued justification and removing them as soon as possible".
They will also exempt shipments of essential Covid-19 products to humanitarian and equitable access mechanisms from export restrictions and prohibitions.
The WTO members will also pledge to consider the interest of least-developed and developing countries and exempt them from export restrictions and prohibition measures to avoid a negative impact of them on their access to essential Covid-19 products.
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