The Director General of IICA and the Deputy Director-General of the WTO met in Switzerland to consider new forms of cooperation in the areas of agriculture and trade negotiations.
San Jose, Costa Rica, November 20, 2013 (IICA). The Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) have strengthened their strategic partnership and are studying concrete options for expanding it, based on the good results achieved over the last decade and more.
The Director General of IICA, Víctor M. Villalobos, and the Deputy Director-General of the WTO, David Shark, met at the beginning of month in Geneva, Switzerland, to reinforce the ties between the two agencies and discuss IICA’s possible incorporation, as an observer member, into the work of the WTO committees on technical barriers to trade and trade and environment.
IICA is already an observer member of two other WTO committees – sanitary and phytosanitary measures (since 2002) and agriculture (since 2010). Only last September the organization’s member countries renewed the Institute’s participation in the latter group.
“The WTO views the assistance that IICA provides to the countries of the Americas for decision-making on agriculture and trade negotiations as a very positive contribution,” remarked the IICA Director General, who was accompanied by Rafael Trejos, Manager of the Institute’s Center for Strategic Analysis for Agriculture.
Villalobos added that the strategic partnership between the two entities was seen as a model for WTO cooperation with partners in other regions of the world.
In Geneva, the representatives also discussed IICA’s possible participation in a WTO project involving cooperation on sanitary issues and trade facilitation in the Caribbean.
In the Caribbean region, the Institute has experience in this area, and around the middle of this year began to implement an initiative funded by the European Union on sanitary and phytosanitary measures.
In addition to its status as an observer member of two committees, IICA’s strategic partnership with the WTO also led to a joint Reference Center being set up at the Institute’s Headquarters in Costa Rica, which the countries of the Americas can use to obtain technical information related to agriculture and international trade.
The Reference Center was inaugurated in June 2012.
For further information:
rafael.trejos@iica.int
