We participate

As we have witnessed over the past years, rapid transformations in global food systems raise new opportunities, but also a substantial array of challenges, with implications for the achievement of the collective ambition set out under Agenda 2030 in the form of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Agriculture continues to play a pivotal role in contributing to economic growth, poverty alleviation, rural development, as well as food security, reflecting its importance not only as a provider of food, but also as a source of income for many households. Meanwhile, rising per capita incomes, urbanisation, diversifying demand patterns, as well as the emergence of global value chains present new market opportunities for farmers, trading and food processing firms, consumers and other types of economic actors. Nonetheless, in the face of increased competition for limited natural resources, fragile ecosystems and unpredictable effects of climate change, seizing these opportunities is not without competing risks and challenges. Added to this, new public policy issues are arising in relation to the increased use of digital technologies; and, more particularly, as to what they will imply for the structure and continued development of agriculture and food systems.

The workshop will thus explore the different challenges and opportunities stemming from key market trends coupled with uncertainties. It will discuss the role of policy design and implementation in laying the foundations for a productive, competitive, equitable and sustainable agricultural and food system and how policies can be employed as a coherent package, adapted to the circumstances of different countries and regions. The workshop will therefore focus both on selected global issues and trends and on the specific policy questions facing Chinese agricultural policy going forward.

Further information is available on the OECD's website.

ICTSD is organising and partnering many sessions at the WTO Public Forum held at the WTO in Geneva from 2 to 4 October 2018. The theme of the annual forum is “Trade 2030.”

In addition, ICTSD will be hosting a booth located in the Delegates' Lounge on the ground floor of the WTO main building for the duration of the public forum. The ICTSD stand will feature a selection of recent issues of the Bridges suite of periodicals as well as ICTSD publications relevant to the Public Forum theme of "Trade 2030" – offering constituents and new audiences an opportunity to meet and engage with programmatic and editorial teams.

ICTSD will be hosting and co-hosting a number of sessions within the agenda of the Public Forum as indicated below. In order to attend these sessions, you must be registered for the WTO Public Forum.

The Left Behind in Sustainability Practices: Children and Women
WTO Room S2
2 October 2018 – 11:30 – 13:00
Listen to the audio recording of this session

Delivering on Development by 2030: What Role for the WTO in the New Economy?
WTO Room S2
4 October 2018 – 10:00 – 11:30
Listen to the audio recording of this session

Disrupting the Gender Digital Divide: What Role for International Trade Policy?
WTO Room E
4 October 2018 – 11:30 – 13:00
Listen to the audio recording of this session

ICTSD experts will also be presenting in the following sessions:

Industrialisation 4.0: How to Achieve Sustainable Results for Africa?
WTO Room S3, Geneva
2 October 2018 – 14:00 – 15:30

Linking Food Production Systems, Environment, Food Security and International Trade
WTO Room B, Geneva
2 October 2018 – 15:30 – 17:00

The Willing World: Shaping and Sharing a Sustainable Global Prosperity
WTO Atrium, Geneva
3 October 2018 — 13:00-14:00

Privacy and Consumer Protection in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
WTO Room E, Geneva
4 October 2018 – 10:00 – 11:30

Technology Enabled Services Trade: How to Make this Inclusive?
WTO Room D, Geneva
4 October 2018 – 14:00 – 15:30

Electronic Commerce and Inclusiveness of Global Value Chains
WTO Room E, Geneva
4 October 2018 – 17:00 – 18:30

Room W. Centre William Rapard, ©WTO

The ELSA Moot Court Competition on WTO Law (EMC2) is a student-organized competition designed to enhance knowledge of international trade law and WTO dispute settlement procedures. ELSA is especially dedicated to enhance capacity for meaningful engagement in multilateral trade in the long term.

ELSA Moot Court Competition on WTO Law (EMC2) 

The European Law Students’ Association (ELSA) is an international, independent, non-political, non-profit organization run by and for students and young lawyers since 1981. The EMC2 is one of the flagship activities of ELSA since 2002.

The main aim of the Competition is to assist countries in developing their technical legal capacity by preparing the next generation of trade lawyers and negotiators. With technical support from the WTO, the Competition has grown to become the only global moot court competition on WTO Law.

Participants from around the world send in written submissions, for the complainant and respondent, in a fictitious case. After sending their submissions, all the teams are given the opportunity to present oral arguments in front of panels which consist of WTO and trade law experts. Winning teams from five Regional Rounds (two European Rounds; an Asia-Pacific Round; an All-American Round; and for the last three years, an African Round) compete against each other in the Final Oral Round held in Geneva, Switzerland at the WTO headquarters. 

The African Regional Round of EMC2

The African Regional Round was held for the first time in 2013, and has since grown in terms of participation and support of universities in the region. The organizers welcome donations and other forms of support in order to encourage and sustain the active participation of universities in the region.

Who has participated?

In the first ever Africa Regional Round held in 2013, 7 teams from 6 different countries participated. In 2015, 8 teams from 5 countries participated: Kenya, Lesotho, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. Two of these teams also included nationals from Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2016, 10 teams competed from various African countries, including: Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia and South Africa. In 2017, teams from Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Liberia, Lesotho, and Uganda participated. This year, teams from 10 different countries (Ethiopia, Malawi, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Lesotho, Tunisia, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Uganda) will participate, with Nigeria, Tunisia and Zimbabwe joining the competition for the first time.

How to get involved?

• Participate in the Competition > emc2.elsa.org 
  
• Be a sponsor > emc2.elsa.org/partners/
• Donate 

Your valued contribution will help ELSA International in supporting the participation of students in the region at the African Regional Round and the final Oral Round in Geneva in June. Donation instructions can be found at > emc2.elsa.org/partners/ (Please indicate Support for the African Teams as donation purpose)

ICTSD as a sponsor

The goal of ICTSD is to advance sustainable development through trade-related policy making. ICTSD strives to ultimately strengthen developing countries’ legal capacity.

Since 2014, ICTSD has been providing institutional support to the African Round of EMC2 as a sponsor. ICTSD considers the Competition as one of the keys to having a pool of young talents in the field and in turn further the legal capacity in the region. 

Participant's testimony

“Taking part in this competition opened my eyes to a whole new world with possibilities I had never even contemplated. The moot gave me insight into the world of WTO dispute resolution and actually got me interested in pursuing this as a career option. The moot fueled my desire to one day be among the few international trade law specialist lawyers in Africa.” 

Diana Rufaro Machingaidze, participant 2014/2015

The 2017-2018 Round

25 April – 29 April 2018

Strathmore University, Nairobi

EMC2, African Round > emc2.elsa.org 

The Hosting University

Strathmore University participated in last year’s African Regional Rounds of the EMC2 with success. This participation has resulted in increased academic interest among students and faculty at the university, and incentivized students to enhance their capacities in this field through further study or relevant career path.  The Strathmore Law School has decided to host the African Regional Round in order to contribute to this important capacity building initiative, which has already created enormous opportunities for learning and personal growth among African students. Strathmore Law School (SLS) is one of the constituent schools of Strathmore University (SU), a leading non-profit private university in Kenya, which aims at serving the Kenyan society to the best of its ability. SU holds a peerless reputation for quality in academic and professional education as well as personal formation. 

ICTSD will participate in this workshop organised by the Permanent mission of Canada in Geneva and the WTO. 

The official event webpage and the programme can be consulted at this link. 

The past few years have witnessed an increasingly intense debate on the world-wide growth of national data localization restrictions and barriers to Cross-Border Data Flows (CBDF). Data localization proposals and policies typically involved requirements such as: data must be processed by entities physically within a national territory; data processing must include a specific level of “local content,” or the use of locally provided services or equipment; data must be locally stored or “resident” in a national jurisdiction; data processing and/or storage must conform to national rather than internationally accepted technical and operational standards; or data transfers must be routed largely or solely within a national or regional space when possible. Barriers to CBDF may involve: prohibitions on the transfer of personally identifiable information to jurisdictions deemed to have inadequate laws regarding privacy and data protection; censorship and other limitations on information that governments deem to be ‘sensitive;’ or digital trade protectionism. Governments’ motivations for establishing such policies vary and may include goals such as promoting local industry, technology development, employment, and tax revenue; protecting their citizens’ privacy (or in some cases, claiming to); ensuring access to data for the purposes of law enforcement, and more broadly defending their legal jurisdiction over data; or advancing national security or an expansive vision of “cyber-sovereignty.”

The stakes here are high. For example, the McKinsey Global Institute has estimated that data flows enabled economic activity that boosted global GDP by US $2.8 trillion in 2014, and that data flows now have a larger impact on growth than traditional flows of traded goods. The growth of localization measures and barriers to data transfers could reduce these values and significantly impair not only business operations but also economic development and many vital social processes that are predicated upon the movement of data across a relatively open and unfragmented Internet. Accordingly, specific language limiting such policies has been included in a number of “mega-regional” trade agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). While the TPP has been rejected by the new US government and the forecast for other agreements is cloudy at best, it is possible that at least some of the policies in question are inconsistent with certain governments’ existing commitments under the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). Even so, the extent to which these issues should be addressed via trade instruments remains a highly controversial issue, with many in the global Internet community and civil society remaining very critical of non-transparent intergovernmental approaches to an increasingly important piece of global Internet governance, and many privacy advocates vehemently opposing the potential application of trade rules to personal data.

Accordingly, the purposes of this proposed workshop are four-fold. First, it would bring together senior participants in the international trade and Internet governance communities that to date have not had sufficient opportunities to dialogue on their respective approaches to these and related issues. Second, it would take stock of the growth of data localization measures and barriers to data flows and assess the scope and impacts of such policies. Third, it would consider what can be achieved via international trade instruments given the current geopolitical context. Fourth, and most importantly, it would explore the possibility of constructing a parallel track of multistakeholder dialogue and decisionmaking that is balanced and enjoys the support of diverse actors around the world. In particular, we would consider whether a global community of expertise and practice can be constructed to share information and devise effective normative agreements on the issues. Normative agreements involving sufficient monitoring and reporting could help to ensure that data policies are not applied in a manner that constitutes arbitrary discrimination or disguised digital protectionism, and do not impose restrictions that are greater than what is required to achieve legitimate public policy objectives.

ICTSD will be represented by its Chief Executive, Ricardo Meléndez-Ortiz, who will participate as a speaker in the session.

Carbon pricing is one of the most promising and effective tools to accelerate climate action. While more than 40 countries and regions have already implemented policies to this end, we are still a long way from a global carbon price.

There are many challenges related to the implementation of carbon pricing policies. For one, there are carbon leakage concerns and the difficulty of establishing a carbon price that sufficiently reflects the negative externalities of emissions. Moreover, possible socio-economic effects related to a price increase of goods and services would need to be properly addressed as well as the question of how to use the revenues generated from pricing carbon.

It is against this backdrop that I4CE, AFD and Enerdata organised this COP 23 event to discuss the issue of carbon pricing policies and the opportunities offered by the use of carbon revenues. ICTSD was represented by Andrei Marcu, Senior Fellow, ICTSD and Director, ERCST who participated as a speaker in the roundtable. 

The Paris Agreement on climate change has paved the way for climate action around the globe. To fully accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy it is necessary that states agree on the remaining details of the Accord, including on how to operationalise Article 6 on voluntary cooperation.

Countries have pledged in their nationally determined contributions to level-up climate action. While this constitutes an important step for the climate, a consensus on how to link regional, national, and sub-national policies has not been reached yet. In particular, a central challenge is how to facilitate the use of internationally transferred mitigation outcomes for the purpose of meeting a country’s own mitigation objectives, in the context of the great heterogeneity that characterises individual NDCs.

It is against this backdrop that Harvard University and Fondazione Centro Studi Enel organised this COP 23 side event on how to link carbon pricing instruments. ICTSD was represented by Andrei Marcu, Senior Fellow, ICTSD and Director, ERCST who participated as a speaker in the roundtable.