TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search resultsWTO insists on its relevance despite rising protectionism
The World Trade Organization continues to play an important role in global trade despite its reduced ability to settle disputes between countries in an increasingly protectionist world.
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
A pillar at the front gate to the World Trade Organization's headquarters shines under the sun on Sept. 15 in Geneva, Switzerland. (JP/Deni Ghifari)
T
he World Trade Organization continues to play an important role in global trade despite its reduced ability to settle disputes between countries in an increasingly protectionist world, with Washington’s unilateralist approach raising doubts about the organization’s relevance in the international order.
Referring to sweeping United States import tariffs introduced this year, WTO director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala acknowledged "unprecedented challenges and disruption, such as we’ve never seen in world trade in 80 years”.
“We have disruption, but there's a resilient core. There's a resilient multilateral core [...] in a nonstable equilibrium,” Okonjo-Iweala told reporters on the sidelines of the WTO Public Forum in Geneva on Sept. 16.
She admitted that the disruptions from the US “have undercut or undermined the global trading system of the WTO” but declared that “multilateralism is not backing off”.
Seventy-two percent of global trade is still “going on WTO terms” today, she noted, though that figure marked a drop from 80 percent at the beginning of the year, before US President Donald Trump released a barrage of so-called reciprocal tariffs, starting in the second quarter.
“What is amazing to me is that it's still this high, because the impression when you read what is happening in the world is: It's finished, there is no more trade on WTO terms, it's a free-for-all everywhere,” the former Nigerian finance minister said.
Bernd Lange, a senior lawmaker of the European Parliament, told The Jakarta Post on Sept. 17 that the European Union was “living” by a multilateral approach and the parliament was “defending it”.
