Almost 90 trade associations, including the U.S. Council for International Business and the Semiconductor Industry Association, released a statement May 17 urging World Trade Organization members to renew the moratorium on customs duties on electronic transmissions until the next ministerial conference. The trade associations said that continuing the moratorium is key to the COVID-19 recovery and to "supply chain resilience for manufacturing and services industries in the COVID-19 era." Lifting the moratorium would jeopardize all of these benefits since it would disrupt cross-border access to knowledge and digital tools, the statement said.

Since the last World Trade Organization Committee on Customs Valuation meeting, Bolivia and Georgia have submitted new notifications about their customs legislation, the WTO announced. Relaying the details of the May 17 committee meeting, the WTO said members also reviewed notifications of national customs legislation. Bolivia's and Georgia's updated legislation was noticed in the committee's status of notifications of national legislation on customs valuations. The next committee meeting is Oct. 24.

The World Trade Organization released a new data portal to allow access to databases on "trade in goods, services, dispute settlement, environmental measures, trade-related intellectual property rights and more," the WTO announced May 17. One such database is the "WTO Stats portal," which allows access to time series statistics on trade in goods and services on an annual, quarterly and monthly basis as well as market access indicators that give key information on governments' bound, applied and preferential tariff rates.

A group of tech industry associations released a statement May 16 to voice their support for an expansion of the Information Technology Agreement at the World Trade Organization. An expansion would see emerging technologies covered by the tariff-elimination elements of the pact and extend to areas of the globe not currently covered by the ITA, the statement said. Citing a study from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, the trade associations said that expanding the ITA would add almost $800 billion to global GDP over the next decade.

China, in a May 10 General Council meeting at the World Trade Organization, announced its position on the text from the EU, India, South Africa and the U.S. over the intellectual property waiver for COVID-19-related goods, the WTO said. The world's second-largest economy said it won't seek to use the benefits of the text, which simplifies how governments can override patent rights for COVID-19 products, unless language is used to provide the waiver benefits to all developing members. China also encouraged countries with the capacity to export vaccines to opt out. China also rejected a second option in the plan that would restrict waiver eligibility to the developing countries that exported more than 10% of the globe's 2021 vaccine doses, the WTO said May 10.

Lansana Gberie of Sierra Leone, the new chair of the World Trade Organization's Council for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, shared a draft of the contentious COVID-19 intellectual property waiver, the WTO announced May 3. The draft, which came following informal talks with the four leading negotiators -- the EU, India, South Africa and the U.S. -- would allow WTO members to skirt IP restrictions for goods pertaining to fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Under the proposal, WTO members would be able to issue a single authorization to use all patents needed to make a COVID-19 vaccine and waive the requirement that authorized use of such a vaccine be predominantly to supply the domestic market, making exports of such goods legal in order to ensure equitable access by eligible members to the COVID-19 vaccine covered by the authorization. However, reasonable efforts would have to be made to quash efforts to re-export the vaccines that entered the member countries under the decision, the report said. The proposal will now be considered by all 164 WTO members.

Turkey started arbitration proceedings with the EU over Turkey's measures on the production, import and marketing of pharmaceutical products, the World Trade Organization said April 28. The proceedings were established under the Dispute Settlement Understanding to review the findings of a WTO dispute panel on the Turkish measures. The report found that Turkey has set up a system to prioritize domestic pharmaceutical products over like imported products in its review of applications for market authorization, which the panel concluded is "inconsistent with" the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The WTO said Turkey and the EU agreed on procedures for arbitration to "decide any appeal from any final report."

The U.S. and other World Trade Organization members called out China yet again for failing to fully submit its subsidies to the WTO during the April 26-27 meeting of the Committee on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures, a person with knowledge of the meetings told reporters in an email. The U.S. pointed out that after examining certain financial statements of certain fossil fuel companies in China, it found that the Chinese government granted financial grants totaling over $1.9 billion in 2020 that were not reported to the WTO. Apart from asking China to clarify why these grants were not reported, the U.S. also asked China to clarify whether distant water fishing enterprises are completely tax exempt. In response, China asked the U.S. to look at its relevant enterprise income tax law provisions, which the U.S. found uninstructive. Also during the meeting, other WTO members -- namely, Brazil, Morocco, China and Russia -- brought up complaints about U.S. countervailing duty action. In particular, China blasted the U.S.'s "abusive use" of "adverse facts available" in CVD cases, while Russia said the U.S. continued to use flawed practices resulting in the finding of subsidies where none exist.

The World Trade Organization's 12th Ministerial Conference is officially set to take place June 12-15 at the WTO headquarters in Geneva, the WTO announced. The ministerial has been rescheduled multiple times due to COVID-19 travel restrictions.

World Trade Organization members affirmed their commitment to engage in discussions over its dispute settlement system at the April 27 meeting of the Dispute Settlement Body, the WTO said. The biggest point of contention concerns appointments to the WTO's Appellate Body. The U.S., which has long blocked appointments to the body, hindering its ability to function, said it doesn't support the current proposal to begin appointing members to the Appellate Body.