Ukraine war shadow on G20 meeting joint communique

Jaipur: The two-day long G20 trade and investment ministers meeting (TIMM) under India’s presidency ended on Friday without a joint communique even as members agreed in principle to enhance global value chain (GVC) resilience amid “multi-dimensional crisis” and persistent trade disruptions due to the pandemic and the ongoing Ukraine conflict.

The outcome document warned that the global economic recovery since the pandemic outbreak has been uneven and near-term prospects of global trade and investment look uncertain.

“Mounting challenges are adversely affecting predictability and resilience of global trade—aggravating poverty and inequality—and negatively impacting achievement of sustainable development objectives,” the statement read.

The G20 leaders agreed they will strengthen cooperation to increase transparency of Sanitary and Phyto Sanitary (SPS), and Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) measures in line with World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements, and will also continue to assist developing countries and least developed countries (LDCs).

However, like several other G20 meetings, the text on Ukraine war and its impact on global economy became a point of contention between the member nations, chiefly Russia and China.

Russia rejected the inclusion of geopolitical Para 32, saying it doesn’t conform to the G20 mandate and recognizes the status of Para 32 as Chair’s Summary. Russia, however, agreed with the rest of the text.

Meanwhile, China stated that the G20 TIMM isn’t the right forum to discuss geopolitical issues and didn’t support the inclusion of the geopolitical-related content.

Commerce minister Piyush Goyal said a groundbreaking consensus on five concrete and action-oriented deliverables was achieved, adding there was one paragraph where “we could not get consensus for obvious reasons”.

The action-oriented deliverables included the adoption of high-level principles for the digitalization of trade documents and a push to boost access of information to micro, small and midsize enterprises (MSMEs).

Notably, the leaders endorsed a G20 generic mapping framework for global value chains.

“The framework also advocated to identify key dimensions to help evaluate the resilience of GVCs both at the sectoral and product levels. Moreover, guiding principles for collaboration to address the need for keeping critical GVCs resilient and robust were also enunciated in the framework,” according to an official statement.

As per the statement, WTO Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala asked all the G20 ministers to narrow down realistic deliverables for agreement at the WTO’s 13th Ministerial Conference (MC13) in early 2024.

The statement further read that the G20 ministers welcomed the voluntary sharing of best practices on Mutual Recognition Agreements (MRAs) for professional services and supported the development of a Presidency’s Compendium of best practices on MRAs for professional services.

The compilation of good practices will spur successful entering into MRAs which will enable recognition of technical qualifications of Indian doctors, nurses, lawyers, architects, and other professionals by other countries. It will thus immensely help Indian professionals in providing their technical services across the world, the statement said.