THE World Trade Organisation (WTO) is planning to convene an event in mid-April to discuss ramping up COVID-19 vaccine production and how the members can contribute, said the WTO's Director-General Ms Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala on Tuesday.

"The idea is to move us along on our quest to solve this unacceptable inequitable access of poor countries to vaccines," she said at the informal General Council meeting. "At the bottom of this is a very serious scarcity in supply. And how to solve it is to look at how we expand manufacturing in all its ways."

The event, to be held under Chatham House rules, will include all regional member groups, representatives from vaccine manufacturers from developing and developed countries, civil society groups working on access to medicine, and other relevant stakeholders.

She stressed that the event would help advance global discussions on access to vaccines in the shot to medium-term and a longer-term framework agreement that would provide for automatic access for developing countries in future health crises, including a way forward on the TRIPS waiver proposal many of them support.

"We also need to look to the future and agree a framework where countries do not need to stand in the queue in order to get access to life-saving vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics," she said, emphasizing that this can be done while still incentivising research and development.

The WTO chief also called on members to deliver concrete results in the runup to the Twelfth Ministerial Conference (MC12), which will take place in Geneva in November.

With only seven working months until MC12, DG Okonjo-Iweala called on members to "create a recipe for success upfront," starting with "two or three or four concrete deliverables" in areas such as fisheries and agreeing on work programmes for other items where differences remain.

She noted that MC12 would come at the end of a series of international policy discussions aimed at examining the lessons from this pandemic and trying to put the framework for tackling the next.

If trade ministers emerge at the end of the year "with no agreement, no contributions to the meaningful issues that are being faced by the world today, nothing to add in terms of a framework for tackling the next pandemic, it will not look good," she cautioned.