The Director-General recalled the strengthened partnership between the WTO and the FAO in the areas of food and agriculture. She highlighted the WTO's ongoing efforts to update trade rules, stressing that the multilateral trading system must be complemented by domestic policies that reduce distortions and enhance competition. She pointed to the importance of “policies that provide essential public goods to farmers such as research, pest and disease control, efficient water management, and extension services that are needed to improve productivity and sustainability.”

Her full remarks are below:

Director-General QU Dongyu,
Your royal highnesses,
Excellencies,
Distinguished delegates,
Ladies and gentlemen,

I'm delighted to join you in opening this year's World Food Forum.

My main message to you is that trade — and the World Trade Organization — are vital parts of an agrifood system that can deliver good food for people now and in the years ahead.

My remarks today will look at three areas: the challenges ahead for farming and food security; how trade can help; and the role of the WTO.

First, the challenges.

The FAO's latest figures show around 733 million people are facing hunger — most of them in Africa and South Asia [1]. At our current pace, we won't meet Sustainable Development Goal to end hunger and malnutrition by 2030.

Climate change is a growing threat to food security, affecting every aspect of our food systems, and exacerbating the sector's problems with water and land management, biodiversity loss, and deforestation. 55% of the world's food production occurs in areas experiencing drying or unstable trends in total water storage.

Agricultural production and consumption continues to be distorted by trade restrictions and subsidies

In 54 countries analysed by the OECD, support provided to individual producers averaged USD 630 billion per year [2] from 2020 to 2022.* This support often has environmentally harmful effects, encouraging the overuse of fossil fuels, energy and water.

The distance between business as usual and truly sustainable food systems is considerable. The FAO has estimated that our current agri-food systems impose “hidden” health, environmental, and social costs equivalent to at least USD 10 trillion per year. [3]

Turning now to trade, the case for how it can help is straightforward: about one in four calories consumed is traded.

Between 2000 and 2022, agricultural trade grew five-fold, rising across all world regions. [4] The average applied tariff on agricultural goods has fallen [5] from 13 percent in 2005 to just 5.8 percent in 2022, helping make food more affordable and available, while incentivizing exporters to ramp up production in response to international demand.

Trade has contributed to food security and resilience: For example, when the war in Ukraine cut off Ethiopia from its traditional source of wheat imports, the existence of deep and diversified global markets meant it could source from Argentina and the United States instead.

The Global Commission on the Economics of Water, which I co-chair, will issue a report later this week that highlights the role of ‘virtual water trade’ in agriculture, through the water used to grow or make a traded product. It notes that trade can help mitigate water-related pressures, provided water's price reflects its value and scarcity with targeted subsidies to those who cannot afford to pay, by allowing countries with abundant hydrological resources to specialize in producing water-intensive goods for export to water-scarce nations.

For example, there are export opportunities here for several African countries who have been found to have abundant and shallow under-utilized ground water resources as well as land resources,  provided  of course these resources are well and innovatively managed.   In fact, based on these land and water resources, Africa not only can and should feed itself, using intra Africa food trade to manage supply and demand gaps but can also respond to external world demand. 

Beyond trade's contribution to ensuring that food is available, trade-led growth and income gains have contributed mightily to bringing down hunger in countries including China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, to name a few. [6]

Now we need to help others replicate this success, sustainably — including elsewhere in Asia and Africa.

This brings me to the role of the WTO.

The WTO provides a negotiating forum where members could lower trade barriers and reduce trade-distorting support, helping agricultural markets function better and freeing up billions of dollars' worth of resources that could be put to better use. But the fact is that at a time when a comprehensive update to the global agricultural trade rulebook is long overdue, we have not been so successful in moving forward agricultural trade negotiations at the WTO. But we will never give up trying. Agriculture and a well- functioning agricultural trading system is too important to the world. 

This past Thursday, I chaired a meeting of all WTO members, where we looked at how to revitalize the negotiations and set the stage for delivering at least some concrete results by our next Ministerial Conference in Cameroon in early 2026. We have hard work ahead of us and we also need political will. I implore all the Food Security and Agriculture Ministers here to back your Trade ministers and their Geneva based WTO ambassadors to exhibit appropriate flexibility in their negotiating positions so we can move past 2.5 decades of stagnation to a new era of modern agricultural trade rules fit to help feed the 21st century world. 

In this regard, cotton, both a food and non food commodity, is of paramount importance to several countries worldwide. 

Last week, I was in the Republic of Benin to mark World Cotton Day. And while we are supporting exciting efforts  there and in the Cotton Four plus countries in West and  Central Africa to add value to their products and tap into global markets for textiles and clothing, particularly in the sports apparel sector, I want to note for all concerned that this does not mean we are paying attention to the issue of trade  distorting domestic support that lowers cotton prices and weighs on the livelihoods of millions of farmers in cotton producing countries  around the world. 

On the bright side, in pursuing agriculture reforms at the WTO, we have some recent accomplishments to build on.

At our 12th Ministerial Conference in 2022, members committed to refrain from imposing export controls on humanitarian purchases by the World Food Programme — a step that the agency has said is helping to source food more quickly, and from more countries.

Our landmark Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies will help ease pressure on the marine fish stocks that millions of people rely on for food and livelihood security. I urge you to help fast-track ratification of this agreement in your countries, and support the rapid conclusion of negotiations on Phase 2 of the Fisheries Subsidies Agreement on some outstanding issues so that the USD 22  billion being spent annually on harmful fisheries subsidies that can be repurposed to more beneficial uses. 

I want to take a moment here to highlight the WTO's appreciation for the work we do with the FAO.  In this regard, let me thank DG Qu Dongyu and Chief Economist Maximo Torero Cullen and their team for the excellent collaboration with the WTO. Our joint MoU signed last December ranges from work on fisheries and the associated trust fund, to supporting cotton, the Standards and Trade Development Facility and — last but not least — the Agriculture Market Information System. We look forward to continuing this collaboration whose aim is to assist FAO and WTO members. Collaboration between multilateral organizations brings coherence and congruence to helping members and the people they represent. 

In conclusion, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen. A free, fair, open and predictable MTS and modernized agricultural trade rules are critical to an agrifood system that can deliver good food to the world’s people today and tomorrow. But such a trading system must be complemented by domestic policies that reduce distortions and improve competition. It must be complemented by policies that provide essential public goods to farmers such as research, pest and disease control, efficient water management, and extension services that are needed to improve productivity and sustainability. 

I am convinced that we can all work together, Multilateral organizations,  Governments, Farmers, Civil Society, Private sector, to enable people around the world to access the food and nutrition they need in a changing climate  and a changing and uncertain world.

Thank you.

*(NOTE: “support” is not the same here as “subsidies”, as it includes transfers from consumers to producers that result from border measures such as tariffs, in addition to budgetary outlays.).