WTO holds crunch meeting amid growing uncertainty over multilateral system

Tariff wars smashed old system, but failure to agree on reforms could see ‘some people writing a new rulebook’.

The embattled World Trade Organization has met against a backdrop of global economic turmoil sparked by conflict in the Middle East and rising protectionism, facing the threat of “disorderly collapse” if it fails to strike a new deal on global rules.

Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said at the opening session of the body’s 14th ministerial conference in Yaounde, Cameroon, on Thursday that the old “world order” was not coming back, following a year of turmoil marked by United States President Donald Trump’s smashing of international trade rules with his sweeping tariffs.

“We will not get it back … We must look to the future,” said the WTO chief in what has been billed as a make-or-break moment for the organisation. The global trading system was, she said, experiencing the “worst disruptions in the past 80 years”.

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said that Trump’s aggressive trade policies were “a corrective response to a trading system, embodied by the WTO, that has overseen and contributed to severe and sustained imbalances”.

The status quo, he said in a video statement, had become “economically unworkable and politically unacceptable”, insisting that the “new world order” would involve agreements between smaller groups, rather than “wasting years and even decades to agree on a lowest common denominator”.