Remarks by DG Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
Welcome Dr Tedros, Kristalina, Angel, David and Isabelle. And many many thanks from my part.
This stocktaking comes at a critical juncture.
In the three decades before any of us had heard of a novel coronavirus, open global trade helped lift more than a billion people out of poverty.
By tapping into cross-border flows of goods, services, and ideas, developing countries were able to accelerate growth and create better jobs.
For the first time in two hundred years, developing countries started to narrow the gap with richer ones.
Yet even at the time it was clear that many people and countries were unable to take advantage of trade opportunities because they lacked the supply side capacity to do so. That is why the Aid for Trade initiative was set up in 2005.
Today the pandemic is reversing hard-won development gains, adding to the problems facing the most vulnerable.
The World Bank has warned that more than 150 million people could be pushed into extreme poverty, ending a thirty-year downward trend. South Asia and Africa are likely to be the regions worst affected in terms of increased poverty and food insecurity.
The pandemic provoked the steepest fall in global trade that we have on record. In the second quarter of 2020, the value of global merchandise trade fell by 21% compared to the year before. Goods trade subsequently rebounded, though not to pre-crisis levels.
Services trade has fared less well, weighed down by travel and tourism, which in the third quarter were still more than two-thirds below pre-pandemic levels. Some services sectors benefitted: as workers and businesses moved online, trade in computer services was up by 9%.
The crisis is exacerbating inequalities of all kinds, from gender roles within households and societies, to the economic resilience of countries.
Least developed countries were hit hardest by the fall in trade, and have benefitted least from the rebound. Preliminary figures indicate LDC services exports fell 55% in the second quarter, year on year — nearly double the figure for the rest of the world. For the first three quarters of 2020, LDC goods and services exports were down 19%, compared to 15% for the rest of the world.
Many low- and middle-income countries are on track for weak recoveries. Kristalina has warned of a ‘great divergence’, in which advanced economies and a handful of emerging markets recover from the COVID crisis, while most developing countries are left behind. This would condemn millions more people to extreme poverty in the years ahead.
Our challenge, this week and in the years ahead, is to make sure this does not happen. The post-COVID recovery must not leave anyone, or any country, behind.
The first step towards this goal must be a rapid, global vaccine roll-out that ends the pandemic. This must include global scale up of manufacturing including in emerging markets and low-income countries with access to technology and know-how, whilst we work out the issues of intellectual property rights and the necessary flexibilities that also incentivise research and development. Such an approach would be the best global stimulus that money can buy. Closing the funding gap for the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator is an urgent priority.
We have to ramp up vaccine production, particularly in developing countries, making the most, as I said, of existing manufacturing capacity and putting in new manufacturing capacity against the next pandemic. Countries rely on each other for the ingredients and components that go into making, distributing, and administering vaccines. We need more trade cooperation to address supply bottlenecks, lower regulatory hurdles, to facilitate trade, and finance vaccine purchases. That is why I would like the WTO to work with Members, industry, civil society, and other stakeholders to see what immediate action can be taken to boost vaccine production. This will also help us prepare for future health crises.
But vaccines alone will not prevent the divergence that Kristalina talked about.
Keeping global markets open is essential for a strong and sustained recovery. Delivering results at the WTO this year, including at MC12, would provide greater certainty and predictability for trade.
Aid for trade will remain essential. Trade finance must not be allowed to dry up.
An important lesson from the past year is that trade made the supply of key medical products more resilient. In the first half of 2020, exports of personal protective equipment grew by 50%. Trade in textile face masks grew more than six-fold. But there is scope to enhance resilience by making medical supply chains more geographically diverse — and this represents an opportunity for export-oriented investment in many low- and middle-income countries.
This jobs and diversification agenda ties into many issues being discussed at the WTO, such as e-commerce, investment facilitation, women in trade, and micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises, and the greening of trade. In fact, developing nations will need investment and assistance to adapt to climate change, build climate resilient infrastructure and build greener and more diversified economies.
Sessions this week will explore all of these issues in detail, from trade facilitation in landlocked countries to building pharmaceutical production capacity in developing and least developed countries.
Let me conclude by saying that I know development assistance budgets are under pressure. This is understandable. But we should remember that the organisations and Members that have cooperated on the Aid for Trade initiative have made a huge difference in peoples' lives. We have documented some of this in our publication “Strengthening the Capacity of Africa to Trade”, released yesterday.
Working together now to invest in the recovery of trading partners is not just the right thing to do. Building back a greener, more equitable, more prosperous global economy is a matter of economic self-interest for all countries. We can't afford not to.
Thank you very much.
Dr. Tedros WHO
My sister Ngozi and my other two sisters Kristalina & Isabelle,
And my two brothers David and Angel,
Excellencies, dear colleagues and friends,
First of all, I would like to congratulate my sister Ngozi on becoming the first woman and the first African to be chosen as Director-General of the World Trade Organization.
And thank you for prioritising this important stocktake to address the ongoing economic and health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on global trade.
More than 122 million cases of COVID-19 have now been reported to WHO, and more than 2.7 million people have lost their lives.
But as you know, the impacts of the pandemic go far beyond the death and disease caused by the virus itself.
Millions of people have lost their livelihood, the global economy is in recession and global trade continues to be disrupted.
And although the global rollout of vaccines is giving us hope of bringing the pandemic under control, we still have a long way to go and many challenges to overcome.
After six weeks of declining cases in January and February, we have now had four straight weeks of increases.
And last week, the number of deaths rose for the first time in seven weeks.
Cases are increasing in most regions. These are truly worrying trends as we continue to see the impact of variants, opening up of societies, and inequitable vaccine rollout.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have known that vaccines would be a vital tool for controlling it.
But we also knew from experience that market forces alone would not deliver the equitable distribution of vaccines.
That’s why in April last year we established the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator, which includes the COVAX vaccines pillar, a unique partnership between Gavi, CEPI, Unicef, WHO and others.
In total, COVAX has now delivered more than 32 million doses of vaccine to 57 countries and economies.
We expect to deliver a total of 237 million vaccines between now and May.
Still, the rollout of vaccines has not been as equitable as we would have liked.
Globally, 459 million doses of vaccine have been administered, but 76% of those are in just 10 countries.
The success of COVAX is at risk because of the demands that some high- and upper-middle income countries are putting on the global supply of vaccines.
This is not just a moral outrage, it’s also economically and epidemiologically self-defeating.
The more transmission, the more variants. And the more variants that emerge, the more likely it is that they will evade vaccines. We could all end up back at square one.
And as long as the virus continues to circulate anywhere, people will continue to die, trade and travel will continue to be disrupted, and the economic recovery will be further delayed.
Vaccine equity is not an act of charity; it’s the best and fastest way to control the pandemic globally, and to reboot the global economy. Vaccine equity is in every nation’s interest.
Every day, we are engaged in discussions with manufacturers and leaders of countries at all income levels, exploring ways to ramp up the production and equitable distribution of vaccines.
We see four main ways to do this.
The first and most short-term approach is to connect vaccine manufacturers with other companies who have excess capacity to fill and finish, to speed up production and increase volumes.
The second is bilateral technology transfer, through voluntary licensing from a company that owns the patents on a vaccine to another company that can produce them, as AstraZeneca has done with SKBio in the Republic of Korea and the Serum Institute of India.
Critically, bilateral tech transfer must include provisions for affordability and equity, which has unfortunately not always been the case with some of the vaccine deals done so far.
The third approach is coordinated technology transfer and licensing, through a global mechanism coordinated by WHO, which we have established through C-TAP.
This provides more transparency, and a more coherent global approach that contributes to regional health security.
And fourth, waiving intellectual property rights, as proposed by South Africa and India, is a mid- to long-term solution that could help countries with vaccine manufacturing capacity to start moving towards producing their own vaccines.
The TRIPS Agreement was designed, as you know, to allow for flexibility on intellectual property rights in the case of emergencies. If now is not the time to use those flexibilities, then when is? This is an unprecedented situation.
My sisters and brothers,
In some public discourse, the response to the pandemic has been framed as a choice between lives and livelihoods; between health and the economy.
This is a false choice, a false dichotomy. The pandemic is a devastating demonstration that health and the economy are integrated and inter-dependent.
When health is at risk, everything is at risk. But when health is protected and promoted, individuals, families, communities, economies and nations can flourish.
The pandemic will subside, but there will be another one.
And countries will continue to face myriad health challenges that sap productivity, fuel inequality, and hold nations back.
We can only truly respond and recover if we think of health not as a cost, but as an investment in the safer, fairer and more prosperous world we all want.
I thank you.
Welcome Dr Tedros, Kristalina, Angel, David and Isabelle. And many many thanks from my part.
This stocktaking comes at a critical juncture.
In the three decades before any of us had heard of a novel coronavirus, open global trade helped lift more than a billion people out of poverty.
By tapping into cross-border flows of goods, services, and ideas, developing countries were able to accelerate growth and create better jobs.
For the first time in two hundred years, developing countries started to narrow the gap with richer ones.
Yet even at the time it was clear that many people and countries were unable to take advantage of trade opportunities because they lacked the supply side capacity to do so. That is why the Aid for Trade initiative was set up in 2005.
Today the pandemic is reversing hard-won development gains, adding to the problems facing the most vulnerable.
The World Bank has warned that more than 150 million people could be pushed into extreme poverty, ending a thirty-year downward trend. South Asia and Africa are likely to be the regions worst affected in terms of increased poverty and food insecurity.
The pandemic provoked the steepest fall in global trade that we have on record. In the second quarter of 2020, the value of global merchandise trade fell by 21% compared to the year before. Goods trade subsequently rebounded, though not to pre-crisis levels.
Services trade has fared less well, weighed down by travel and tourism, which in the third quarter were still more than two-thirds below pre-pandemic levels. Some services sectors benefitted: as workers and businesses moved online, trade in computer services was up by 9%.
The crisis is exacerbating inequalities of all kinds, from gender roles within households and societies, to the economic resilience of countries.
Least developed countries were hit hardest by the fall in trade, and have benefitted least from the rebound. Preliminary figures indicate LDC services exports fell 55% in the second quarter, year on year — nearly double the figure for the rest of the world. For the first three quarters of 2020, LDC goods and services exports were down 19%, compared to 15% for the rest of the world.
Many low- and middle-income countries are on track for weak recoveries. Kristalina has warned of a ‘great divergence’, in which advanced economies and a handful of emerging markets recover from the COVID crisis, while most developing countries are left behind. This would condemn millions more people to extreme poverty in the years ahead.
Our challenge, this week and in the years ahead, is to make sure this does not happen. The post-COVID recovery must not leave anyone, or any country, behind.
The first step towards this goal must be a rapid, global vaccine roll-out that ends the pandemic. This must include global scale up of manufacturing including in emerging markets and low-income countries with access to technology and know-how, whilst we work out the issues of intellectual property rights and the necessary flexibilities that also incentivise research and development. Such an approach would be the best global stimulus that money can buy. Closing the funding gap for the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator is an urgent priority.
We have to ramp up vaccine production, particularly in developing countries, making the most, as I said, of existing manufacturing capacity and putting in new manufacturing capacity against the next pandemic. Countries rely on each other for the ingredients and components that go into making, distributing, and administering vaccines. We need more trade cooperation to address supply bottlenecks, lower regulatory hurdles, to facilitate trade, and finance vaccine purchases. That is why I would like the WTO to work with Members, industry, civil society, and other stakeholders to see what immediate action can be taken to boost vaccine production. This will also help us prepare for future health crises.
But vaccines alone will not prevent the divergence that Kristalina talked about.
Keeping global markets open is essential for a strong and sustained recovery. Delivering results at the WTO this year, including at MC12, would provide greater certainty and predictability for trade.
Aid for trade will remain essential. Trade finance must not be allowed to dry up.
An important lesson from the past year is that trade made the supply of key medical products more resilient. In the first half of 2020, exports of personal protective equipment grew by 50%. Trade in textile face masks grew more than six-fold. But there is scope to enhance resilience by making medical supply chains more geographically diverse — and this represents an opportunity for export-oriented investment in many low- and middle-income countries.
This jobs and diversification agenda ties into many issues being discussed at the WTO, such as e-commerce, investment facilitation, women in trade, and micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises, and the greening of trade. In fact, developing nations will need investment and assistance to adapt to climate change, build climate resilient infrastructure and build greener and more diversified economies.
Sessions this week will explore all of these issues in detail, from trade facilitation in landlocked countries to building pharmaceutical production capacity in developing and least developed countries.
Let me conclude by saying that I know development assistance budgets are under pressure. This is understandable. But we should remember that the organisations and Members that have cooperated on the Aid for Trade initiative have made a huge difference in peoples' lives. We have documented some of this in our publication “Strengthening the Capacity of Africa to Trade”, released yesterday.
Working together now to invest in the recovery of trading partners is not just the right thing to do. Building back a greener, more equitable, more prosperous global economy is a matter of economic self-interest for all countries. We can't afford not to.
Thank you very much.
Dr. Tedros WHO
My sister Ngozi and my other two sisters Kristalina & Isabelle,
And my two brothers David and Angel,
Excellencies, dear colleagues and friends,
First of all, I would like to congratulate my sister Ngozi on becoming the first woman and the first African to be chosen as Director-General of the World Trade Organization.
And thank you for prioritising this important stocktake to address the ongoing economic and health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on global trade.
More than 122 million cases of COVID-19 have now been reported to WHO, and more than 2.7 million people have lost their lives.
But as you know, the impacts of the pandemic go far beyond the death and disease caused by the virus itself.
Millions of people have lost their livelihood, the global economy is in recession and global trade continues to be disrupted.
And although the global rollout of vaccines is giving us hope of bringing the pandemic under control, we still have a long way to go and many challenges to overcome.
After six weeks of declining cases in January and February, we have now had four straight weeks of increases.
And last week, the number of deaths rose for the first time in seven weeks.
Cases are increasing in most regions. These are truly worrying trends as we continue to see the impact of variants, opening up of societies, and inequitable vaccine rollout.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have known that vaccines would be a vital tool for controlling it.
But we also knew from experience that market forces alone would not deliver the equitable distribution of vaccines.
That’s why in April last year we established the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator, which includes the COVAX vaccines pillar, a unique partnership between Gavi, CEPI, Unicef, WHO and others.
In total, COVAX has now delivered more than 32 million doses of vaccine to 57 countries and economies.
We expect to deliver a total of 237 million vaccines between now and May.
Still, the rollout of vaccines has not been as equitable as we would have liked.
Globally, 459 million doses of vaccine have been administered, but 76% of those are in just 10 countries.
The success of COVAX is at risk because of the demands that some high- and upper-middle income countries are putting on the global supply of vaccines.
This is not just a moral outrage, it’s also economically and epidemiologically self-defeating.
The more transmission, the more variants. And the more variants that emerge, the more likely it is that they will evade vaccines. We could all end up back at square one.
And as long as the virus continues to circulate anywhere, people will continue to die, trade and travel will continue to be disrupted, and the economic recovery will be further delayed.
Vaccine equity is not an act of charity; it’s the best and fastest way to control the pandemic globally, and to reboot the global economy. Vaccine equity is in every nation’s interest.
Every day, we are engaged in discussions with manufacturers and leaders of countries at all income levels, exploring ways to ramp up the production and equitable distribution of vaccines.
We see four main ways to do this.
The first and most short-term approach is to connect vaccine manufacturers with other companies who have excess capacity to fill and finish, to speed up production and increase volumes.
The second is bilateral technology transfer, through voluntary licensing from a company that owns the patents on a vaccine to another company that can produce them, as AstraZeneca has done with SKBio in the Republic of Korea and the Serum Institute of India.
Critically, bilateral tech transfer must include provisions for affordability and equity, which has unfortunately not always been the case with some of the vaccine deals done so far.
The third approach is coordinated technology transfer and licensing, through a global mechanism coordinated by WHO, which we have established through C-TAP.
This provides more transparency, and a more coherent global approach that contributes to regional health security.
And fourth, waiving intellectual property rights, as proposed by South Africa and India, is a mid- to long-term solution that could help countries with vaccine manufacturing capacity to start moving towards producing their own vaccines.
The TRIPS Agreement was designed, as you know, to allow for flexibility on intellectual property rights in the case of emergencies. If now is not the time to use those flexibilities, then when is? This is an unprecedented situation.
My sisters and brothers,
In some public discourse, the response to the pandemic has been framed as a choice between lives and livelihoods; between health and the economy.
This is a false choice, a false dichotomy. The pandemic is a devastating demonstration that health and the economy are integrated and inter-dependent.
When health is at risk, everything is at risk. But when health is protected and promoted, individuals, families, communities, economies and nations can flourish.
The pandemic will subside, but there will be another one.
And countries will continue to face myriad health challenges that sap productivity, fuel inequality, and hold nations back.
We can only truly respond and recover if we think of health not as a cost, but as an investment in the safer, fairer and more prosperous world we all want.
I thank you.
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