Piyush Goyal cautions against 'game of dividing' by developed countries at WTO for favourable agreement on fisheries, ecommerce

Ahead of a key ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO) early next year, commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal cautioned emerging markets, developing countries and the least developed countries of the developed countries’ “game of dividing” them to get agreements on fisheries and e-commerce moratorium that address the needs of a few countries only.

At the Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII) India-Latin America & Caribbean (LAC) Region Conclave, he said that at the last WTO ministerial, many countries were trying to divide such countries through “small sops”.

The minister also said that India has two more GCC countries’ requests to do a bilateral trade agreements after the UAE and that Russia and its friendly countries are also looking to do an FTA.

“We fail each other, we fail to understand each other. At the WTO ministerial conference last year, (we saw) how in many areas we were not on the same page despite having shared interests in many areas,” Goyal said.

Cautioning the global South of this “divide and rule policy”, the minister said that “many countries were trying to divide the emerging markets, developing world and the less developed countries through small sops”.

“They are playing the game so beautifully, dividing us,” he said, adding that on fisheries agreement, they isolated a certain large section of the developing or less developed countries by a de minimis which addressed the needs of a few countries.Goyal said that India is part of the agreement on agricultural subsidies which was signed 30 years ago and he can “see before my eyes that the same thing will be done whether it’s in fisheries, the same thing is sought to be done when it comes to the e-commerce moratorium”.India and South Africa have sought a review and relook at the moratorium on e-commerce transmissions that has continued for 24 years citing a loss of revenue.

“Today we are at the mercy of the developed world…We are today stuck and are finding that our agricultural people and nearly 40-45% of Indian population subsists on agriculture, are today at a big disadvantage,” he said.

He called the African, Latin American and the Caribbean and Pacific countries to work as a team.

On healthcare, he said that the LAC countries can work together through mutual recognition agreements and smarter regulatory practices and “not remain hostage to very high cost expensive meditations”.

“We saw during the Covid pandemic, the behavior of different countries around the world,” Goyal said.