Anita Anand, Canada’s minister of public services and procurement, opens a box with some of the first 500,000 of the two million AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine doses that Canada secured last March through a deal with the Serum Institute of India.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Carlos Osorio - POOL
Despite some public virtue signalling, the Canadian government is not doing all it can to improve global access to COVID-19 vaccines. Canada has yet to announce its position on the WTO patent waiver.
A COVID-19 surge has pushed hospitals in India beyond their capacity. A stadium in New Delhi was being used as a makeshift ward on May 2, 2021.
Getty Images
Licensing agreements between pharmaceutical companies and the Medicines Patent Pool, in cooperation with the WHO, could accelerate access to doses for the poorest countries.
Hospital staff in Lagos, Nigeria, administer the AstraZeneca vaccine.
AP Photo/Sunday Alamba
A Biden presidency promises a return to multilateral trade agreements. But it remains to be seen how it approaches the World Trade Organisation.
Health-care workers put on personal protective equipment before testing at a drive-thru COVID-19 assessment centre at the Etobicoke General Hospital in Toronto.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette
As we stare down a second wave of COVID-19, there are far better alternatives to prevent shortages and ensure adequate supply of medical goods than trade restrictions.
Italian fishers unload a fishing net aboard a trawler during a fishing trip in the Tyrrhenian Sea in April 2020. Fishing subsidies are resulting in serious overfishing.
(AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)
Everyone who cares about marine biodiversity, fish, fishers, coastal communities and fishing industry workers of today and tomorrow must push for the end of fisheries subsidies.
The World Trade Organisation has thrown out the final legal challenge to Australia’s tobacco plain packaging laws. Now countries across the world can implement this game-changing public health policy.
Harvesters work on a soybean harvest in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil.
(Pixabay)
For the second time this century, crises have led to calls to transform our global food system. We can start with restructuring the global food trade so that it complements local food systems.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Donald Trump flagged new fronts in his dangerous campaign of economic nationalism.
Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA
Stephen J. Silvia, American University School of International Service
A quarter-century ago, more than 100 nations agreed to engage in freer trade with one another and signed the declaration that established the World Trade Organization.
Australia’s Harvester Judgement of 1907 defined a living wage as ‘fair and reasonable’ payment sufficient for an unskilled worker to support a family in reasonable comfort.
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