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A New Opportunity to Reform the World Trade Organization
Even before President Donald Trump dramatically upended the global trading system by wielding tariffs as a weapon to force others to comply with his demands, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was struggling to maintain its relevance and effectiveness. Amid intensifying competition among major powers and deep divisions over trade rules and priorities, WTO member countries found themselves shackled by a strict commitment to consensus decision-making (which essentially means complete agreement).
The highly anticipated Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations, launched by the WTO in 2001, has not yielded any agreements despite more than a decade of efforts. Similarly, most multilateral negotiations have stalled in recent years, with the notable exception of the 2022 agreement on fisheries subsidies. As a result, pressing global issues such as food security, agricultural subsidies, inequality gaps, the impact of trade on workers, public health cooperation, and climate change have remained unaddressed.
However, the international trading system is too important to be disrupted and neglected. Collaborating with other leading experts from around the world, we have proposed a path to reshape trade to align with modern needs. Even as multilateralism faces increasing pressure, constructive reform opportunities still exist.
As a first step, trade ministers participating in the WTO’s fourteenth ministerial conference in Yaoundé, Cameroon this week should work to reestablish the trading system’s focus squarely on sustainable development, as stipulated in the WTO’s foundational document, the Marrakesh Agreement of 1994.
This focus reflects the role that trade has played as a driver of global prosperity throughout the post-war era. As international trade volume has surged from about $60 billion in 1950 to $35 trillion today, the global average GDP per capita has increased from approximately $4,600 to over $21,000, adjusted for inflation. However, these growth benefits have not reached everyone.
In fact, the WTO, once revitalized, holds the potential to change this outcome. Crafting human-centered and sustainability-oriented trade rules could help create jobs and alleviate poverty by supporting the integration of emerging economies into the global economy. Moreover, updated processes and priorities could accelerate the dissemination of new innovations to combat shared threats like pandemics and help ensure the widespread sharing of benefits from artificial intelligence and the emerging digital economy.
Trump is not wrong in criticizing how the current trading system operates. Yet, the global cooperation that the system is designed to enable is now more essential than ever: climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, and technological disruptions are transnational challenges that no single country can tackle successfully alone. Rather than abandoning the system altogether, we should leverage the ongoing “decoupling” in the global order, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recently put it, to reform how the system is built.
To advance this process, ministers gathering in Yaoundé must not only reaffirm the fundamental principles upon which the WTO is based but also embark on innovating a reform agenda. Equally important, they must begin rebuilding trust among WTO members. This will not be an easy task in a fractured political environment, but it is a critical prerequisite for establishing a trading system that delivers greater benefits to more people—and to the planet.
The good news is that ministers will not have to start from scratch. Despite last year’s upheavals, the global trading system has remained resilient. By 2025, over 70% of global trade occurred under WTO rules. The WTO Secretariat and its partner organizations—the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and the International Trade Centre—continue to play a crucial role in providing the technical alignment and capacity building that facilitate international trade.
Furthermore, ambitious regional integration efforts and bilateral trade agreements are gaining momentum around the world, including the African Continental Free Trade Area, the Comprehensive Economic Partnership among 15 Asia-Pacific countries, and the historic free trade agreement recently signed between the European Union and the Mercosur bloc in Latin America. The most prominent initiative has been the 2024 agreement on climate, trade, and sustainability among Costa Rica, Iceland, New Zealand, and Switzerland, which serves as a model for a trade system that places sustainable development at its core.
While WTO members agree on the need for reform, they disagree on what shape it should take. Achieving consensus after arduous negotiations will undoubtedly take years. But this serves as an additional reason for the fourteenth ministerial conference to initiate the process now by affirming that the primary purpose of trade is to support human prosperity on a healthy planet, and that any reforms should be aligned with those goals.
WTO negotiators, based in Geneva and often constrained by existing rules, past practices, and old divisions, need a political signal to open the door to progress. The fourteenth ministerial conference provides an opportunity to deliver this signal. In fact, the WTO—and the rest of the world—urgently needs to see that most countries remain committed to multilateralism.
