EU Statement at the General Council meeting on 15-16 October 2024

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EU Statement at the General Council meeting on 15-16 October 2024

17.10.2024 EU mission to the WTO in Geneva - Press and information team

Statement delivered by Ambassador Joao Aguiar Machado and Deputy Permanent Representative, Hiddo Houben

2. Incorporation of the Investment Facilitation for Development Agreement into Annex 4 of the WTO Agreement - Draft Decision (WT/GC/W/927/Rev.1

Article X.9 sets a legal path for Members to add a plurilateral agreement to Annex 4 of the WTO Agreement. Article II.3 also sets conditions for plurilateral agreements, notably that they do not create rights or obligations for Members that are not party to it. The IFD Agreement needs to be assessed in light of those provisions.

The EU is convinced that all those conditions are met. We fully support the explanations provided by the IFD Coordinators and the interventions of other delegations outlining the compliance of the IFD Agreement with Article X.9.

We welcome Pakistan as the 126th co-sponsor of the request for incorporation.

Trade and investment issues are inextricably connected. The attempt to isolate trade matters from investment issues does not reflect the realities of the global economic system. How else can we support developing and least-developed Member countries integrate their production into international markets and global value chains, if not through increasing Foreign Direct Investment flows. This is why the IFD Agreement matters so much, and receives such overwhelming support by the Membership, notably by an overwhelming majority of 89 developing economies, 27 of which are least developed countries. And this is why it is so important for the WTO to take this decision, showing that this organisation can deliver on such an important issue.

We welcome the engagement and constructive efforts undertaken by those Members who were not part of the negotiations and have raised concerns and questions. We continue to be ready to address those, but we need to scale up our joint efforts.

What we need now is a structured process of dialogue in small group meetings to address in a time-bound manner the remaining technical and legal questions some Members might still have, under the guidance of the General Council Chair. The objective of such consultations is clear. We need to find consensus on the legal incorporation of the IFD Agreement by the end of this year.

We look forward to continuing the constructive discussions in the next weeks.

3. Report by the Chairperson of the Trade Negotiations Committee and Report by the Director-General

Agriculture will play an important role in the MC14. There will be a strong need to deliver tangible outcomes on agriculture, and in particular for Africa.

Director General, we all agreed in TNC and you rightly concluded that the agricultural negotiations need a fresh impetus.

Allow me therefore to stress how important it is in our view that, before turning to the facilitator-led groups' process, we do take the time and space to grasp how the different contemporary challenges spelled out in the Chair's report and again reminded by several members during the TNC - interact with the different negotiating issues in CoASS. It is only by allowing this calibration between the agricultural negotiations and the cross-cutting contemporary challenges of food security, climate change, sustainability, and transparency that we will manage to find a way to do things differently this time.

As for the facilitator-led process, under yours and the CoASS Chair leadership and guidance, we would need a clear structure time-wise and even, more importantly, content-wise in such a way that meaningful outcomes could be achieved by the 14th Ministerial Conference.

We see the stringent need to agree on a departure point, while keeping in mind the different level of maturity of the discussions of the agricultural pillars. Let us not forget that there is work that has been done already by this membership for a common work program, before and after MC13 and which had reached a certain level of consensus, which we have not seen in years. This should not be wasted, but rather valued and kept as a benchmark for future discussions.

If it is to succeed, such a process would need to be pragmatic, inclusive, objective, and transparent. Not an easy task, but the European Union stands ready to contribute in a constructive manner.

4. Follow-Up to Outcomes of Ministerial Conferences: MC13 (Abu Dhabi); MC12 (Geneva, co-hosted by Kazakhstan); MC11 (Buenos Aires); MC10 (Nairobi) and MC9 (Bali) - Statement by the Chairperson

4.1 Work Programme on Electronic Commerce - Report by the Facilitator

The European Union welcomes the resumption of the discussions in the e-Commerce Work Programme after the summer break, under the leadership of the new Facilitator, HE Dr Richard Brown of Jamaica.

Members concur on the need to deliver concrete outputs and recommendations to Ministers at the next Ministerial Conference, as mandated at Abu Dhabi. To this end, the European Union believes that we should focus on a set of priority themes of key importance to developing countries and LDCs.

We see the Work Programme as an important contribution towards achieving an inclusive, predictable and rules-based international digital trading environment. In this context, we believes that agreeing by MC14 on a stable solution for the moratorium on custom duties for electronic transmissions remains a priority for our work. We look forward to further discussing the impact of the moratorium in one of the upcoming meetings of the Work Programme.

Further, the European Union believes that promoting knowledge-sharing among Members, notably in the form of peer learning, represents a concrete way to help developing countries tackle the challenges they encounter in the roll-out of their digital ecosystems. My colleague from Trinidad and Tobago referred to that just now.

In this context, collaborating with other intergovernmental organizations will help to shed light on their existing programmes which support - notably through funding opportunities - capacity building of developing countries and identifying the needs assessments.

Finally, the Work Programme could also organise thematic workshops, where we could rely on the expertise of these international organizations, but also of the private sector, and in particular of MSMEs, in order to better understand the challenges that they are facing as they step up their e-Commerce activities.

We hope that the work of the Work Programme over the coming months will result in a concrete set of actions leading to a stable international e-commerce environment.

6. Follow-up to the 8 July Retreat - Request from Argentina; Australia; Cambodia; Canada; Chile; China; European Union; Hong Kong, China; Malaysia; New Zealand; Singapore; Switzerland and the United Kingdom

The European Union, together with the other co-sponsors, is committed to engagement on decision making.

Reform is something we keep doing in our daily works and we should continue to incorporate improvements as we go forward. We support the reflection on the balance between inclusion and effectiveness and an important part of the discussion is how to ensure transparency.

We encourage a further discussion on the topic to see how we can put forward some of the practical improvements.

7. Practical Steps to Enhance the Process for the Appointment of Officers to WTO Bodies - Communication from Canada, Chile and Singapore (WT/GC/W/950)

The European Union would like to thank the Ambassador for the outline he has given and which we very much support.

Over the years, there have been delays with appointments being put in place only by summer, which has been quite disruptive for the Organisation and individuals, who spend three months waiting before start working.

What is in the proposed document, are practical steps to anticipate the process, to ensure the slate is appointed by the first General Council of the year. This is good housekeeping.

The second, is seeking to empower regional coordinators to be able to negotiate, to be able to find the balances. And if there are problems, this could be raised to the General Council Chair, so he can address problems, as was done this year, quickly and in good harmony.

I would like to add two specific points. The possibility to chair for two years would be good for the Organisation. In the past, Committees were chaired for two years, and this is also the case for the special sessions and the plurilaterals. Their appointment is often for more than a year, and that can ensure a good balance between the chairs and the secretariat. Otherwise, by the time a chair knows what he is doing, he is up for re-election.

When the committee is happy with the chair, the committee could ask for the chair to be reappointed. It would ensure a harmonious process and recognise the individuals' capabilities.

We look forward to engaging on this text and invite the co-sponsors to take this forward. Hopefully, in December we can agree on this as these are just practical steps to improve our work.

8. Implementation of the MC13 Ministerial Decision on Dispute Settlement Reform (WT/MIN(24)/37 - WT/L/1192) - Request from Brazil

The European Union wishes to thank Brazil for the inclusion of this item on the agenda of the General Council.

We cannot overstate the importance of dispute settlement reform discussions. A fully functioning dispute settlement system is critical for rules-based trade.

This is why we should spare no effort to deliver on our objective, as agreed in the MC13 decision on Dispute Settlement Reform. If we are to fulfil the MC13 mandate, the discussions must be focussed and build on the progress we have already achieved.

We wish to thank the Facilitator and the co-conveners for their work over these last few months, and for ensuring the transparency and inclusivity of the discussions, as decided at MC13.

We have had good discussions on the priority issues of appeal/review and accessibility, as it was captured recently in the Transparency Note dated 8 October. We welcome the progress made with respect to accessibility and stand ready to discuss this issue further.

At this stage, the fundamental issue of appeal/review remains unresolved. With less than three months until the end of the year, we must focus our efforts on finding concrete solutions to this issue. So far, several reforms have been identified that show promise and we should focus our work on such reforms. Our task should be to find a combination of reforms that - together with the reforms envisaged in the draft consolidated text - meet the interests of all Members.

The European Union will continue its constructive engagement and openness to reform. As we have explained before, to preserve our interests we will seek to maintain the right to appeal review, the appeal adjudicators' ability to review and correct legal errors, and a standing adjudicative body. We believe that, through a right combination of reforms, this can be reconciled with the interests of all Members, including the interests in avoiding law-making by adjudicators and in focussing the dispute settlement function on resolving disputes.

Finally, a word of caution. We must avoid ending up in an exercise similar to that of the DSU review process: those discussions lasted for over two decades and did not lead to a result. We must keep in mind that, the more we add new topics to our discussions, the more we risk derailing this process and moving away from our common goal: a fully-functioning Dispute Settlements system accessible to all. We cannot afford that. The rules-based system is at stake.

9. Dialogue on Sustainable Agriculture in the Multilateral Trading System - Communication from Brazil

The European Union would like to thank Brazil for its Communication on Sustainable Agriculture in the multilateral trading system, circulated on 4 June 2024 to the WTO.

We welcome the suggestion to establish a dedicated dialogue on sustainable agriculture, to focus on how the multilateral trading system can better support agriculture and food systems towards sustainability and resilience. The European Union has good experiences and reflection to share about that. We are therefore looking forward to a comprehensive and shared agenda for the upcoming retreat.

In the European Union's view, repurposing trade distortive support, as promoted by the United Nations, represents a significant opportunity to help transform food systems, support climate action and achieve the SDGs. In phasing out the most distortive, environmentally and socially harmful support, and redirect it towards investments in public goods and services for agriculture, as well as decoupled support, especially if linked with conditionality and environmental requirements.

The European Union therefore considers it of utmost importance to talk about sustainable agriculture in the WTO since the challenges we are dealing with are global. We are looking forward to exchanges in the Dialogue on sustainable agriculture, where topics related to the transition to sustainable food systems, particularly in developing countries, is part of how the WTO can contribute to Sustainable development and protection and preservation of the environment.