Minutes - TRIPS Council - View details of the intervention/statement

Ambassador Carlos Pérez del Castillo (Uruguay)
World Trade Organization
G.ii WIPO-WTO Joint Initiative on Technical Cooperation
31. The representative of the Secretariat said that, since the Council's meeting in April, the emphasis on the Joint Initiative had, of course, been on providing the technical cooperation sought. However, a request from one additional country had also been received. Following the general approach agreed between the two Organizations on how to respond to the requests under the Joint Initiative, the International Bureau of WIPO had continued to take the lead in organizing and providing the bulk of the assistance requested. The WTO Secretariat had contributed to these activities to the extent that its resources permitted. Since the beginning of the current year, WTO staff members had participated in seven events organized by WIPO and had committed themselves to provide resource persons for a further six events in the coming months. In addition, a number of events jointly organized by the two Organizations had been held in order to respond to matters raised under the Joint Initiative. Two joint national seminars had been held recently in Latin America and a further two joint WIPO/WTO TRIPS national seminars would take place in the autumn. Also relevant for the Joint Initiative were two joint UPOV-WIPO-WTO regional workshops on the protection of plant varieties, held in Egypt and Kenya during May 1999; these workshops were part of the follow-up to the Joint UPOV-WIPO-WTO Symposium on the protection of plant varieties held in February 1999 in Geneva. A similar joint workshop had been held in Thailand in March 1999. One final point that he mentioned was that the technical cooperation activities of the WTO Secretariat, including in the field of TRIPS, had been increasingly constrained by a shortage of funds. The Secretariat was faced with virtually no funds to meet any new requests for the remainder of the current year. In addition to this, the fact that 90 per cent of the Secretariat's technical assistance funding was extra budgetary made it difficult to plan future events in an efficient manner. These issues had been raised by the Chair of the Committee on Trade and Development and an extraordinary session of the Budget Committee would be held in September to discuss this matter.
IP/C/M/24