Committee on International Trade Ordinary meeting
1 October 2026
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INTA European Parliament
Follow its sittings04:08 - 09:12
Speaker 1
Dear colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our October INTA meeting. There is an agenda proposed. Any objection to that? Not the case, so the agenda is adopted. This meeting is of course webstreamed, so welcome from Lüneburg to Ljubljana, from Tallinn to Thessaloniki, and of course also across the Atlantic, welcome to Washington.
We have interpretation, so speak in a moderate way. Point three, we have chair's announcement, and it is on the minutes of the meeting of the 3rd of September, which will be included as a decision by the coordinators, excuse me, they will be included into the minutes of this committee meeting today. And if there are no objections until the end of this meeting, then they will be adopted. And we have the minutes from the INTA meeting from the 13th and 14th of July, and here the same procedure, if there are no objections until the end of the meeting, they are approved. Point five is the report back from Geneva, from the WTO Public Forum, which took place in mid-September in Geneva, and we were present from the 17th and 18th of September.
And to be honest, I was a little bit skeptical to go to Geneva. I feared that this organization is more or less finished.
But I have to tell you that I'm really more optimistic after the visit, so that the mood to stabilize this organization and be realistic what the possibility of modernization could be is there. So it is not the full new creation of the WTO, but step by step focusing on realistic issues. We had an own panel with the IPU together. We had bilateral meetings with the ambassador of the EU, of course, with India, Indonesia, Brazil, Japan. And then it was also an interesting coincidence that the new World Trade Report was published, where we could really see that there is an increase in trade and there's a clear perspective that global GDP is going because of trade.
And without trade, it might be a decrease of 10% without WTO and the rules at the end of the day would come.
So then we had also our discussion with the friends from the other parliaments, the steering committee of the parliamentary conference and it was well attended from India, Indonesia, Nigeria, United Arab Emirates, Norway and Turkey. And we had also really constructive exchange with the Director General of the WTO and also she was clear that in these times slow reform could be achieved but it is on the way. And therefore our work as parliamentarians in the WTO is perhaps even more important so that we can stabilize this path for slight reforms. And this role of the parliamentarians in the whole concept, so we have to discuss. And dear colleagues, I was a little bit upset about the parliamentary conference in Abu Dhabi at the WTO ministerial where only a few parliamentarians were there and my feeling was that this engagement was not really developed.
And therefore some new measures were taken, some let's say awareness-raising seminars in some regions of the world were organized. And we will have our next steering committee here in Brussels in March next year, so that the colleagues from the other parliaments will also come to the inter-meeting. But we will have also two days for more intensive discussion about functioning and perspective of the parliamentary conference. So, Jörgen, you were also present.
09:12 - 11:23
Speaker 2
Yes, thank you Bernd. I totally agree with you first of all. I think it is very important that we go to the public forum and that we interact with the other people going there and that we of course give our full support to the WTO in this very problematic situation. And I also would like to underline what you said about the role of parliamentarians and we can really push that and show our leadership in that role as well, which is also why it is so important that we invite everyone here to Brussels in March and make sure that the participation increases.
When it comes to the ministerial, you're absolutely right, and I think it is worth to say once again that it is a good thing that we produced an outcome document and that we for the first time ever had the opportunity to hand it over to Dr. Ngozi as well. But as you said, the participation of the members, the other members at that point were not satisfactory, and that's why we need to increase it. On other things that you... Well, so we also had a panel, of course, and I guess Catarina Vieira might talk a bit more about that because it was good that we did a panel together with the IPU partners, which we usually do, and that was of course a great thing. And I think also we are, well, from the Parliament side and not least myself, I'm trying to push this idea to have ministerials every year.
And I think it is important to say that because as we know, it's every second year, and we need to put that political pressure there a bit more and a bit often. And if you do it every second year, the expectations that you will reach great outcomes every second year is there, but if you do it every year, which most of other international organization does, then the expectations might be taken down a bit and you can do smaller and incremental changes.
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