The WTO has Overseen Two New International Trade Agreements in the Last Decade

· Seven Agreements since 1994

· Dispute Settlement Appeal still in Dispute

· 8.6% of World Population still live in Poverty, Down from 43% in 1980

The Numbers: GATT/WTO agreements since 1990 -

1994 Uruguay Round Agreements

1996 Information Technology Agreement

1997 Financial Services Agreement

1998 Basic Telecommunications Agreement

1999 “Moratorium” on Tariffs on Electronic Transmissions

2013 Trade Facilitation Agreement

2022 Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies

What They Mean:

Wrapping up their 12th Ministerial Conference (“MC-12”) at 4:30 a.m. last Friday after a 48-hour negotiating marathon, WTO members announced a set of agreements on electronic commerce, fisheries subsidies, and other matters. Temporarily stepping a long way back from their content, here is context from Franklin Roosevelt’s March 1945 letter to Congress announcing the opening of the world’s first “multilateral” trade negotiations:

“The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and of danger. The world will either move toward unity and widely shared prosperity or it will move apart into necessarily competing economic blocs. We have a chance, we citizens of the United States, to use our influence in favor of a more united and cooperating world. Whether we do so will determine, as far as it is in our power, the kind of lives our grandchildren can live.”

Two years later, these first set of talks ended without achieving all Roosevelt or Truman (whose administration completed them) had hoped for, but with a 23-country tariff-reduction accord known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. This, the "GATT," is the direct ancestor of the modern, 164-member World Trade Organization. Whether the “grandchildren” in question — say, those born in 1980 and afterwards — have in fact lived in a world of “widely shared prosperity” is a controversial subject, though they have incontestably lived in a world of steadily falling poverty.*

Unity is another question. After eight agreements of steadily escalating scope from 1947 through 1994, and four in the later 1990s, the WTO has spent most of the 21st century in increasingly bitter policy stalemate. The organization's most ambitious goal — the Doha Round, launched in 2001 — never got done, as the membership deadlocked between a liberalizing wing and an India/South Africa/Brazil/China “policy space for developing countries” wing. Up to last week its members had managed only one new agreement (the 2013 Agreement on Trade Facilitation) since the turn of the century. Since then, the Trump administration’s blockage of the WTO’s dispute function eroded the group’s ability to settle arguments over existing agreements; and U.S.-China tariff confrontation, inward policy turns and rising nationalism in a series of major economies, and finally the unprovoked invasion of one WTO member by another raised direct questions about the organization’s ability to function, and more broadly whether appeals to common interests and liberal internationalist ideals of Roosevelt’s type still find listeners.

Last week’s events suggest the cautious answer is that yes, they probably do. A slightly more detailed review of the “MC-12” decisions includes: (1) extension of the 23-year-old international “moratorium” on impositions of any tariffs on electronic transmissions; (2) a compromise text on intellectual property waivers for Covid-related vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics; (3) a program for ‘institutional reform’ meant to be concluded by 2024; (4) guidelines for agricultural stockpiles and export controls, and (5), a wholly new agreement on worldwide fisheries subsidy controls, completed after two decades of discussion, as follows:

· Subsidies prohibited to illegal, unreported, unregulated fishing fleets.

· Subsidies prohibited to fishing in depleted fisheries

· Subsidies prohibited to fleets outside national jurisdiction

Further negotiations on subsidies contributing to overcapacity in fishing fleets, with a deadline for conclusion by 2023.

All in all, a reminder that even in times of distress and division, governments with good will can reach common goals through good-faith negotiation, and address common threats through pragmatic agreement. Roosevelt’s fear of a world divided into “necessarily competing economic blocs” (or one that simply fractures and fragments) remains very relevant today; but the aspiration he expresses for widely shared prosperity has resonance still.

* World Bank data: 43% of the world's people lived in absolute poverty in 1980; 27% in 2000; 8.6% in 2018, the last year for which the Bank has an estimate.