Coronavirus: G20 Trade Ministers decides to keep their markets open, ensure a continued flow of vital medical supplies

To tackle Coronavirus, CVID-19, pandemic, the Trade and Investment Ministers of the G20 and guest countries today decided to keep their markets open, and ensure smooth and continued operation of vital medical supplies and logistics networks.

The G20 is a grouping of developed and developing countries. Its members include India, the US, Italy, France, China, Japan and Turkey.

A statement issued at the end of the meeting said, emergency measures designed to tackle COVID-19 if deemed necessary, must be free, fair, non-discriminatory, targeted, proportionate, transparent, and temporary. It said the measures should not create unnecessary barriers to trade or disruption to global supply chains and be consistent with WTO rules.

In the second such meet through videoconferencing, India has called for creating a global framework for further enhancing affordable access to medicines for fighting pandemics and facilitating easier movement of health professionals across national borders.

In his interventions, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal stressed on the need to uphold multilateral commitments and improve upon its effectiveness to meet current challenges.

The ministers also called for working together for a free and fair international trade. They also said that they will take immediate necessary measures to facilitate trade in those essential goods and agreed to implement those measures, upholding the principle of international solidarity, considering the evolving needs of other countries for emergency supplies and humanitarian assistance.

"We will ensure the smooth and continued operation of the logistics networks that serve as the backbone of global supply chains. We will explore ways for logistics networks via air, sea and land freight to remain open, as well as ways to facilitate the essential movement of health personnel and business people across borders, without undermining the efforts to prevent the spread of the virus," they said in the statement.

Besides, the countries will continue monitoring and assessing the impact of the pandemic on trade and called upon the international organizations to provide an in-depth analysis of the impact of COVID-19 on world trade, investment and global value chains.

The leaders of the G20 last week pledged to inject USD 5 trillion into the global economy to counter the pandemic amid forecasts of a deep recession.