Inside OutWith the WTO’s credibility in crisis, no wonder globalisation is in retreat

The global trade body’s woes, from the lack of support for multilateral agreements to the rise in protectionism, reflect the same stasis that plagues organisations from the WHO to the IPCC, on critical work from global health to climate change

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Workers remove fences next to the entrance of the World Trade Organization headquarters on November 27, 2021, in Geneva after the ministerial conference was postponed due to Omicron. Photo: AFP

Published: 1:30am, 16 May 2022

As the world’s trade ambassadors gird their loins for the upcoming 12th Ministerial Conference (MC12) in Geneva, I did a quick search on the World Trade Organization website to discover what they hope to deliver.

The list was short: a deal to eliminate fisheries subsidies, measures to strengthen food security, and an agreement on stronger health security measures, in particular a waiver on intellectual property rights for Covid-19 vaccines. Progress was “critical for the WTO’s credibility”, the statement said.

There were other items being promoted by the European Union on industrial subsidies, state-owned enterprises, and trade rules to protect the environment, but with no particular expectation that MC12 would deliver anything concrete in the short term.

Then I saw that the WTO report was dated May 3 – not two weeks ago but May 3, 2021. Here we are, a year later: the agenda remains unchanged and absolutely nothing has been achieved after MC12 was repeatedly postponed, from June last year now to June 12-15 this year.

The lack of progress has indeed had a critical impact on the WTO’s credibility, most forcefully – and poignantly – expressed in a recent paper by Alan Wolff, who retired in March last year after four years as the WTO’s deputy director general.

“There have been no negotiated outcomes during the [27 years] the WTO has been in existence, other than a 2015 agreement [ …] to ban agricultural export subsidies [ …], guidance documents for telecoms and financial services, and the Trade Facilitation Agreement reached [in Bali] in 2013,” he said.