G20: Goyal calls to end new trade barriers like vax differentiation, Covid passports

Commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal has called for dismantling new trade barriers like vaccine differentiations or Covid passports, which impose mobility restrictions and impede the movement of personnel needed to deliver critical services.

Pitching for free flow of health services to make them accessible and more affordable at the G20 Trade and Investment Ministerial Meeting in Italy, he also pushed for a waiver of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) to ease supply constraints.

“Our response to the pandemic needs to ensure equitable access to vaccines and other Covid-19 related health products by ensuring quick resolution of the supply side constraints,” he said, adding that one of the ways to demonstrate this is by accepting the Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waiver proposal.


The proposal-jointly floated by India and South Africa a year ago- seeking a waiver for all members of the World Trade Organization from certain provisions of copyrights, industrial designs, patents and protection of undisclosed information in the Trips agreement for prevention, containment or treatment of Covid-19.

Goyal underlined the need for an early universal vaccination against Covid-19.

Calling for an equitable and balanced outcome to the trade negotiations in the fisheries sector, Goyal advocated that countries engaged in distant water fishing should stop subsidizing their fishing in high seas and gradually reduce their fishing capacities, particularly, for overfished stocks.

“To achieve balanced outcomes in Fisheries Subsidies, policy space for future is a must, not only to protect the livelihoods of poor and marginal fishermen and address, the food security concerns but also to diversify, modernise and develop the fisheries sector,” he said.

His statement comes as the WTO aims to finalise disciplines to eliminate subsidies for illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, and prohibit certain forms of fisheries subsidies that contribute to overcapacity and overfishing, in the ministerial conference in December.