The Hinrich Foundation Trade Podcast
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The Hinrich Foundation Trade Podcast
Special Ep. - Why the WTO is struggling to adapt
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In this special edition of the Hinrich Foundation’s podcast on global trade, the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents-USA sits down with Keith Rockwell, Senior Research Fellow at the Hinrich Foundation, to examine why the WTO has reached an existential turning point as longstanding principles such as MFN treatment and consensus decision-making come under growing strain, and why modest reforms may not be enough to revive a system rooted in decades-old rules.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) is facing mounting pressure as its core rules and negotiating processes struggle to keep pace with a more fragmented and politicized global economy. What was once designed as a forum for consensus among a small group of 23 like-minded economies has become increasingly difficult to manage with 166 members and divergent interests. At the same time, key principles such as “most-favoured-nation" (MFN) treatment and consensus decision-making — once central to the system’s transparency and predictability — are now contributing to the WTO’s institutional paralysis.
Rockwell argues that the current crisis has been years in the making, pointing to early warning signs such as governments blocking even routine steps like approving meeting agendas, as well as a growing shift toward plurilateral agreements among groups of willing members.
As governments explore alternative pathways outside the WTO framework, the risk is not only institutional drift but a broader shift in how global trade rules are written. The discussion examines what happens if the WTO can no longer deliver and what is at stake for the global trading system.
Tune in to this podcast as Keith Rockwell, Senior Research Fellow at the Hinrich Foundation, joins the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents-USA to unpack the WTO’s growing paralysis and dysfunction, from blocked negotiations to the rise of plurilateral agreements, and what this means for global trade governance. The podcast follows up on Rockwell’s recent paper for the Hinrich Foundation, “In dire distress: Modest reforms won’t save the WTO.”
Tune into the Hinrich Foundation’s podcast series for insights on international trade.
Here is an excerpt from their conversation:
Roseanne Gerin: Your paper opens with a stark assessment that modest reforms can't save the WTO. What convinced you that the institution has reached such a critical point?
Keith Rockwell: Well, this has been some time in the making. It didn't just happen overnight. We've seen evidence of this dating back really quite some time. I think when we had governments begin to block the agendas of meetings from being approved — a standard clerical procedure — because they didn't like things that were on the agenda, that was a huge red flag. And that began to happen in 2013 to 2016. A lot of this happened. And that's what gave rise to the plurilateral approach, which I know we'll talk about later. But I would say this has been the case. It was in the very beginning, the WTO was seen as this all-powerful, monolithic entity that would be involved in every aspect of our lives, which was never the case, but people saw it in that light. And so that led to a lot of very negative and, I would argue, even paranoid responses to what was going on, and that made it more difficult to move the organization in a productive direction.
Roseanne Gerin: You write that WTO members have been unable even to agree on what reform means. Why has defining reform become so politically fraught?
Keith Rockwell: Trade is political. That's what it comes down to. If you look at it, for example, from the point of view of development, many developing countries think that the WTO can best help them by exempting them — these countries — from all of the WTO rules into perpetuity. And if that's the case, then it makes one wonder what the point of belonging to the WTO is. If you look at the question of consensus, for example, you can see why all the members believe that you need to preserve consensus, because you can protect your rights. But when consensus is used as a means of blocking negotiations to which you are not even participating, it becomes a distortion of what it was intended to be. So there needs to be some form of modification. They're never going to do away with consensus whole hog, but there needs to be some way of using it in a way that does not create problems of the like of which we've just been seeing.