On October 17, Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala met with Estonian President Alar Karis at the World Trade Organization. The two talked about the significance of the WTO-regulated multilateral trading system and how the current geopolitical climate affects international trade.
The UN’s annual Climate Change Conference will once again feature the WTO Secretariat, which is headed by Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. This year’s COP29 will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November, and the Secretariat will assist and work with the many trade-related activities that are planned for the conference. Information on the events, news reports, images, and other materials will be available on the WTO website through a special COP29 portal.
From October 14 to 18, 14 journalists from Latin American media attended a conference jointly hosted by the WTO and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES). The seminar covered the primary issues facing the multilateral trading system as well as the organization’s primary areas of focus.
Liechtenstein has made a CHF 40,000 contribution to the Interim Facility of the Enhanced Integrated Framework (EIF), which aims to support sustainable development and economic resilience among the world’s least-developed nations (LDCs). On October 16, Liechtenstein’s WTO Ambassador Frank Josef Bichsel and EIF Executive Director Ratnakar Adhikari met at the WTO to ratify Liechtenstein’s contribution.
Registration is now open for the US-Argentina second public hearing. disagreement over tubular items
The panel has agreed to hold its second substantive meeting on November 19 and 20, 2024, at the request of the parties to the dispute “United States—Ananta-Dumping Measure on Oil Country Tubular Goods from Argentina (DS617).” The WTO’s Geneva offices will host the live screening, which will also be streamed remotely.
The Fisheries Subsidies Agreement is formally accepted by Burkina Faso.
On October 16, Burkina Faso deposited their acceptance document for the Fisheries Subsidies Agreement. Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was given Burkina Faso’s acceptance document by Karamoko Jean Marie Traoré, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Regional Cooperation, and Burkina Faso Citizens Abroad.
DG Okonjo-Iweala: To attain results, members must “continue to be constructive.”
In order to achieve tangible results, WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala urged WTO members on October 15 to “continue to be constructive” in tackling unresolved issues on the WTO work agenda, including development, agricultural, fisheries subsidies, and dispute settlement reform. At a WTO General Council meeting, she spoke in her role as Chair of the Trade Negotiations Committee.
DDG Paugam: Harmonizing carbon measuring standards is essential for international trade in the future.
In her remarks at the Worldsteel General Assembly on October 14, Deputy Director-General Jean-Marie Paugam underlined how crucial it is to harmonize carbon measuring standards in order to facilitate international trade and effectively address climate change. The WTO is well positioned to assist by acting as a worldwide venue for debates on these issues, he added, adding that governments, businesses, and international organizations “can ensure that trade accelerates decarbonization” by cooperating. Below is the text of his speech.
At the World Food Forum, DG Okonjo-Iweala stated that trade is essential to guaranteeing food security.
Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala emphasized the importance of trade and the World Trade Organization (WTO) in tackling the issues of agricultural and food security during his remarks at the opening plenary of the World Food Forum, which was held by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome on October 14. She underlined that “modernized trade rules [provided by the WTO] and a free, fair, open, and predictable multilateral trading system are critical to building an agrifood system that can deliver good food to the world’s people today and in the future.”
During Trade and Environment Week, trade policies were considered as a major factor in the development of sustainable energy.
At the fifth edition of Trade and Environment Week, which took place in Geneva from October 7–11, 2024, a high-level panel of speakers underlined the critical role that trade policies can play in speeding up the global clean energy transition. In addition to a normal meeting of the WTO’s Committee on Trade and Environment (CTE), the week included 15 talks on various environmental themes hosted by WTO members.
Members look into measures to increase the integration of developing economies into international trade.
Members discussed the flexibilities that developing economies are seeking in relation to WTO agreements on sanitary and phytosanitary measures, technical trade barriers, trade-related investment measures, and technology transfer to least-developed countries (LDCs) at a meeting of the Committee on Trade and Development’s Special Session on October 11. The ideas made by the G90 group of LDCs and developing economies to encourage developing members’ increased participation in international commerce serve as the foundation for the talks.
Geneva marks the end of a training session on market access for states joining the WTO.
On October 11, 23 officials from nine states presently negotiating their WTO membership wrapped up a week-long course on market access for products at the WTO. The technical and practical facets of bilateral market access discussions on products, a crucial component of accession negotiations, were covered in the workshop for participants.
Geneva marks the end of the WTO 2024 SPS Transparency Champions Course.
From September 30 to October 11, Geneva hosted the second iteration of the WTO Transparency Champions Course on Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) measures. Twenty-five government representatives from around the globe participated in the training program. The goal of the course was to improve their comprehension of the WTO SPS Agreement’s transparency provisions.
