Inside OutThe WTO lives to fight another day, but is it ready to tackle the crises of our times?

With breakthrough agreements including against fisheries subsidies, but watered-down deals such as the vaccine IP waiver, the world trade body at least avoided failure

Now the WTO needs to steel itself for new and acute trade challenges, including ensuring health security in the face of pandemics and setting rules to slow global warming

4-MIN READ4-MIN

WTO director general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and chairman of the 12th ministerial conference Timur Suleimenov chat during the opening ceremony at the WTO headquarters in Geneva on June 12. Photo: AFP

Published: 3:30am, 20 Jun 2022

Last Friday, almost unnoticed amid the clatter over Ukraine, inflation, recession, summer firestorms and floods, food shortages and starvation, and pandemic recovery, the World Trade Organization made history.

Trade ministers from the 164-member organisation, meeting for the first time in five years, reached agreements on issues that have dogged it for as long as two decades – on e-commerce, sharing vaccine technology, services trade, food security and, perhaps most significantly, against fisheries subsidies that have caused fish stocks in many parts of the world to collapse.

For an organisation that – since its 1995 formation – has failed to agree on virtually anything (except a small Trade Facilitation Agreement in Bali in 2013), this was nothing short of momentous. Yet celebrations have been subdued.

As Alan Beattie at the Financial Times grudgingly put it, the WTO’s biggest achievement was “keeping itself alive”.

Its Nigerian director general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who must take much credit for the meeting’s success, celebrated by quoting Winston Churchill: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

The meeting avoided failure: it secured no final success; but it reaffirmed the courage to continue.