Climate goals cannot be reached without taking into account the role of international trade, World Trade Organization Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said in a Nov. 8 speech at an event with world leaders at the COP27 climate summit. In her speech, Okonjo-Iweala marked the publication of the World Trade Report, which lays out paths for governments to use trade to support national action plans for grappling with climate change, the WTO said. Examples of this trade action include lowering trade barriers for environmental goods and services, boosting cooperation on carbon measurement and verification, and shifting the WTO's Aid-for-Trade initiative to an investment program that expands sustainable trade opportunities in developing nations.

Parties negotiating an agreement on investment facilitation for development (IFD) at the World Trade Organization "made substantial progress" toward settling remaining issues and achieving a single text, the WTO said of the Nov. 1-3 meetings. The participants showed support for the new and streamlined text following the Nov. 3 open-ended plenary meeting. South Korean Ambassador Jung Sung Park, the negotiations' co-coordinator, said four important parts of the text were moved from proposals in the annex to the body of the agreement.

There's a consensus on the need for reform at the World Trade Organization, according to Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for WTO and Multilateral Affairs Andrea Durkin, but since member countries have different ideas about what reform is, and different ideas about how to achieve it, it will be a "significant challenge" to make changes in Geneva.

Thirty-four World Trade Organization members have submitted 225 notifications pertaining to COVID-19 to the Committee on Technical Barriers to Trade, making up 46% of all COVID-19-related WTO notifications, the WTO Secretariat said in a note. These notifications primarily deal with the "extraordinary and temporary streamlining of certification and related procedures and the introduction of new regulatory requirements for medical goods in response to the pandemic." Most of the notifications, 68%, covered regulations on medical goods including personal protective equipment, pharmaceuticals and medical devices. The note said that since the TBT Committee's May 2020 meeting, WTO members referred to the pandemic in 54 trade concerns, most of which were not linked to COVID-19-related notifications or medical goods but the impacts of the pandemic on the members' economies.

The World Trade Organization on Nov. 1 opened the Trade Remedies Data Portal, a tool that will give access to information on WTO members' antidumping and countervailing duty actions, the WTO said. The portal will display the data via searchable tables and customizable graphs, and allow users to filter the data based on certain parameters. The portal has data on AD/CVD actions that led to the application of trade remedy measures in force on or after Jan. 1, 2020, with updates for information prior to 2020 expected next year. The portal was developed in conjuction with the WTO Secretariat's Open Trade Data Initiative.

World Trade Organization members are lagging in submitting required subsidy notifications, the chair of the WTO ComEighty-nine members still have yet to submit their 2021 subsidy notifications by the mid-2021 deadline, Kerrlene Wills of Guyana, the committee chair, said. Another 76 members have not yet submitted their 2019 subsidy notifications, and 65 have not submitted their 2017 notifications.

World Trade Organization members at the Oct. 24 meeting of the Committee on Safeguards reviewed 19 safeguard investigations taken by other members, the WTO said. Despite the dip in the number of new investigations and applications for new safeguards, WTO members took issue with "the way this instrument was used." China, Japan and Australia expressed concerns about the "timeliness of notifications, the effect of existing safeguard measures on trade, and the numerous extensions of measures," the WTO said.

The World Trade Organization and the Caribbean Development Bank inked a Memorandum of Understanding to boost the "capacity, accessibility and availability of trade resources," to both organizations' members, the CDB announced. The MoU will aid in the implementation of the WTO's Trade Facilitation Agreement and its Agreement on Fisheries and Subsidies agreed to at the 12th Ministerial Conference, the bank said. The agreement will further speed along other initiatives to drop technical barriers to trade, "address Sanitary and Phytosanitary issues and create mechanisms for the agencies to partner to improve capacity building."

The World Trade Organization needs to "update the WTO rulebook" if its members are to address the issues plaguing global food markets, WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said at an Oct. 24 retreat on trade and agriculture, the WTO said. The retreat included two plenary sessions at which farm trade and food security experts discussed the challenges facing the agriculture sector and subsequent policy responses. In her opening remarks, Okonjo-Iweala noted that trade distortions and protectionism "remain a major problem," with "persistent under-investment in research, infrastructure and other public goods" leading to stagnating agricultural productivity. Okonjo-Iweala said items including "public stockholding for food security purposes, market access, cotton, a proposed special safeguard mechanism and improving transparency remain outstanding in the farm trade negotiations."

The EU is hoping for concrete input from the U.S. by year-end on changes to the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement system (see 2210180006), an EU official said, adding member states are growing increasingly impatient about the U.S.’s lack of action. Sabine Weyand, the European Commission’s director-general, also said the discussions within the EU on extending WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS waiver) have become more difficult.