AYABONGA CAWE: Turbulent WTO comes of age
Much has changed since the 1990s, with the locus of production in key wage and capital goods shifting away from Europe, Japan and the US
“MC13,” as the 13th Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is known by the Geneva “diplomatic set”, ended last weekend. Most trade officials and delegations who were part of the six-day event would accept that the Abu Dhabi meeting was an inflection point for the body charged with making global trade rules by consensus.
Almost two decades after the end of the Uruguay Round, the WTO has come of age with the characteristically turbulent temperament of a young adult. Birthed as a successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), some believe the WTO has reached its nadir. Having witnessed many of the deliberations in Abu Dhabi over the last week, it seems to me it is not the WTO that has come to the end of the line, but the nearly eight-decade-old post-World War 2 consensus that stitched divergent parts of the world together around a particular multilateral framework...
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