Decline In Trade Volumes To Continue For Now : WTO

Trade ministers from round the world attended the once-in-two years World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial in Argentina earlier this month. They deliberated on several crucial issues which will impact the multilateral system of worldwide trade.

Two things have changed from the last ministerial. Britain is entirely freed from the ecu Union (EU) agenda and features a huge interest in building a strong multilateral trading system. The US, on the opposite hand, has stated repeatedly that the WTO multilateral system, to the extent that it doesn't put US interests paramount, isn't something that will have its support.

Previous rounds of ministerial meetings have resulted in little or no progress. The last ‘low-hanging fruit’ the WTO was ready to garner for its members was the Trade Facilitation Agreement at the Bali ministerial in 2013. While this came as a lifesaver for the WTO in 2013, it had been on the cards since the Doha Development Agenda within the 2001 ministerial. The 2015 ministerial in Nairobi did nothing much to enhance the WTO’s stature.
The WTO has made limited progress over the past 20 years for varied reasons—be it the one-sided nature of the first agreements, the North-South divide, or the aggression of the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) lobby on subsidies, agriculture and food security at successive ministerial meetings.

Even the protocol of negotiations has skilled a metamorphosis. From secret anteroom negotiations and therefore the subtle ways of worldwide diplomacy, today, countries are quick to state their extreme negotiation positions publicly—seemingly more for the advantage of their constituencies reception . This makes negotiations more cumbersome. In all this noisy rhetoric, what's being missed is that the very real threat to the whole WTO system and its ‘jewel within the crown’, the dispute resolution mechanism.
The dispute resolution mechanism, which has been in situ since the WTO’s inception in 1995, has served its purpose well. It has been an excellent leveller and has enabled smaller countries like Barbados and Antigua to require the US to the Dispute Settlement Body (DSB) and prevail. It has been widely hailed because the biggest success of the WTO.