Session with Partners and International Organization: Food, Health, Development and Gender

G7 Leaders’ Summit

• Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen.

• Everywhere I go these days, young people seem on edge. Instead of hope there is fear: for a future of uncertain jobs, climate crisis, even war.

• To build the peaceful, stable and prosperous world we want – the world they deserve – we need to deliver on growth, development, and human security.

• The challenges are serious. The World Bank recently warned that GDP growth potential is declining in advanced and developing economies, amid ageing demographics as well as slowing investment and trade.

• It said that cooperation on trade – particularly to lower costs related to services and regulatory issues – would help lift long-term growth.

• Trade also matters for the food security, health security, gender equality, and development objectives that we are focusing on here.

• At the WTO we have been looking at all of these areas.

• Overall trade growth has indeed lost speed, but there are important bright spots. Trade in services delivered over computer networks has been booming.

• Trade in digitally delivered services – everything from streaming games to consulting services provided by video – grew by 8.1%  per year between 2005 and 2022, compared to 5.6% for goods.

• In 2022, exports of these services reached $3.8 trillion in value – worth 12% of global goods and services trade, up from 8% just a decade earlier.

• Digitally delivered services offer major possibilities for the Global South and for struggling regions within rich countries, and especially for women and young people.

• To fully realize this potential, we should seek to lower obstacles and set out some shared global rules for digital trade.
  • Nearly 90 WTO members – including all G7 countries, and some of the partners present today – are currently negotiating an e-commerce agreement.

• At our Twelfth Ministerial Conference last summer, ministers pledged to keep trade in food and medical supplies flowing around the world.
  • 37 of the 100 or so export-restrictions on food and fertilizer introduced since the start of the war in Ukraine have been phased out – good progress, but we need to keep going.

• Trade is central to food security – our host Japan imports 60% of its food. That’s why we need to update the global trade rulebook on agriculture, starting at our next ministerial in February.

• Excellencies, your countries created the multilateral trading system. 75 years ago your predecessors placed trade at the centre of the rules-based international order. That decision has delivered for prosperity, and, by historical standards, for peace. Much of the world has bought into your vision.

• The WTO is far from perfect, but our 164 members have shown that reform is possible. Now is not the time to walk away. It is time to create opportunity and hope.