Delivered by Kumar Iyer, Ambassador and Permanent Representative for the UK Mission to the WTO and UN in Geneva.
Thank you Chair.
The UK would like to start by welcoming our new PRs. We wish those that are departing well.
I'd like to start by reminding the Council of the importance of reform for this body. We wish to reiterate that this is the primary focus of MC14 and we should focus our efforts very much on that.
In that context, on agriculture, we would appeal for pragmatism and realism. We would note the comments made by the Chair of the lack of emerging consensus. We believe there may be time still but we would need to come together now in order to make a discussion at MC14 meaningful. If we are not able to get that convergence, we believe we should focus Ministers' attention elsewhere at MC14.
On fisheries, we believe that we should have two Chairs. We believe we should have one Chair for the Fisheries Committee, and the implementation of Fish 1, and we believe we need a Chair for Negotiations to begin in a meaningful way. The clock started ticking on 15 September. We have four years before we start to unravel the limited gains that we have already made by Fish 1. We should not let that happen.
