Turkiye lifts opposition to WTO adopting developing country investment agreement

YAOUNDE: Turkiye’s trade minister said on Thursday that Ankara had lifted its objections to a World Trade Organization agreement aimed at boosting investment in developing countries, having previously opposed the agreement for a host of reasons.

“Turkiye while maintaining its concerns and reservations will not impede the incorporation of the Investment Facilitation for Development Agreement in the WTO,” Omer Bolat told delegates at the opening ceremony of the World Trade Organization’s 14th ministerial conference in Yaounde in Cameroon.

Many countries hope the IFDA, which aims to reduce bureaucratic hurdles to encourage foreign direct investment, particularly in developing and least-developed countries, will finally be incorporated into the WTO during the conference in Yaounde, although India has also been opposed to it.

Turkiye’s announcement marks a change in position after it previously blocked the agreement, partly on the grounds that it failed to define the central term of “investment” itself, and partly for reasons to do with how the deal came about. The IFDA began life as a plurilateral agreement backed by a subset of WTO members, not including Turkiye, rather than a multilateral agreement first put to the entire organisation.

It is unclear whether India, which has opposed the IFDA on the same plurilateral-versus-multilateral lines for fear that its negotiating power may be diluted, will change its position.

The WTO’s Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said Turkiye’s announcement was a positive development.

“This demonstrates the kind of way we want to do business in the future, being able to come together to make agreements that are useful to a subset of members,” she told reporters.

Some WTO members, including the European Union and the United Kingdom, are pushing for the full membership to allow greater use of plurilateral agreements, whereby willing members can agree on certain trade rules among themselves before they are eventually incorporated into the WTO rule book.

However, some developing countries oppose this, fearing it could undermine the multilateral system and that they might not have an equal voice in the rule-making process.