By Olivia Le Poidevin
YAOUNDE, March 27 (Reuters) – The World Trade Organisation is at a “critical juncture” and needs deep reform, the European Union and parties to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership said on Friday.
The EU and the CPTPP – which comprises 12 countries, including Australia, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Malaysia and Britain – met on the sidelines of the WTO ministerial conference in Cameroon on Friday.
“The WTO is at a critical juncture amid heightened tensions in the global trading system,” they said in the joint statement.
Representatives from both groups recognised the need for “urgent, deep, comprehensive and inclusive reform of the WTO.”
They said they seek to “enhance cooperation” among like-minded WTO members in order to drive improvements to the global trading system, while also working together to cooperate on areas of mutual interest such as trade diversification and supply chain resilience.
Both shared concerns about what they described as “market-distorting practices” and oversupply, as well as “economic coercion”.
The EU and CPTPP member countries have been hit with tariffs imposed by the United States in the last year.
The EU has recently called for a rethink of the WTO’s Most Favoured Nation principle, where trading countries have to treat each other equally, on concerns about China.
EU Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic recently said the bloc should make low-tariff access to its markets for Chinese companies conditional on the openness of the Chinese economy to European businesses.
Failure to chart a viable reform path for the WTO may lead the EU-CPTPP and other like-minded economies to deepen their cooperation and look to forge deals among willing members as a “plan B” if the WTO talks in Yaounde do not make progress, Sweden’s Trade Minister Benjamin Dousa minister earlier told Reuters.
(Reporting by Olivia Le Poidevin, Editing by Friederike Heine and Hugh Lawson)
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