Thank you very much for that question.
Let me start with the Ottawa Group. It is an incredibly effective group of countries working together to advance the international rules-based order and the multilateral trading system.
Who is part of the Ottawa Group? Well, it's countries like Japan, Korea, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, Mexico, Kenya, Norway, Brazil, Chile, Switzerland, the European Union, and most recently, the United Kingdom. This is a formidable group of countries that work together to ensure that the work we are doing together will reinforce the work on the international trading order.
I would say that for almost every meeting that we hosted with the Ottawa Group, the director-general has been there. Of late, it has been Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who is a formidable leader as the director-general of the WTO.
The reason this group was formed was to strengthen and build upon those rules that we all depend on. It is called the Ottawa Group for WTO reform.
During the pandemic I was very proud of some of the work that ultimately made its way to the ministerial response to the pandemic. We saw, in the early part, that some 90 countries issued over 200 export restrictions during the pandemic. You can imagine what that would cause to the goods, the inputs that are needed to make very important things like PPE, protective gear, or critical food and medicines that needed to move around the world.
Making sure that there were some rules to deal with a response to the pandemic, this initiative, the response to the pandemic, started at the WTO through the Ottawa Group. It was the Ottawa Group that developed what ultimately ended up being adopted multilaterally by the over 100 members of the WTO to get the multilateral agreement.
We also committed at the ministerial conference to work on the dispute settlement system so that we have a functioning dispute settlement system for the WTO, for the international rules-based order. I'm very pleased. I know you've heard from our ambassador, who is in Geneva working with her colleagues at the WTO, including the United States and many others. This is about working multilaterally to ensure that we have solutions to fortify and strengthen the rules-based system.
I think about e-commerce and the negotiations that are taking place so that we have the kinds of rules that are going to help the digital economy. That is certainly the present and the future. Trade and the environment and the kinds of rules that are going to be necessary to ensure that both the economy and the environment go hand in hand globally is what we are working on there with our multilateral partners.
We're also looking at the negotiating function. Some of the innovations that we have been able to pursue are called joint statement initiatives, or JSIs. We passed one, which is a plurilateral initiative on domestic services regulation, which is making it easier in each of our economies. Those rules that facilitate trade with ease were started as a plurilateral, a JSI, that then went forward to the broader membership and were adopted.
Here's the thing that really was extraordinary: The multilateral rules-based trading system is something that we are committed to working on, and we achieved a ministerial outcome from the WTO membership. Remember it requires every single member to achieve a multilateral agreement, and we did that.
A negotiation in fisheries has been in negotiation for over 20 years. Finally, at this multilateral meeting we came to an agreement to protect our fish stock in the world. That work continues.