I used to work at the WTO Secretariat (1996–2015), and am now an occasional freelance journalist, focusing mainly on international trade rules, agreements and institutions. (Previously, analysis for AgraEurope.)
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The proposal would apply to notifications under 14 agreements and decisions covering almost the whole of trade in goods
Posted by Peter Ungphakorn JULY 18, 2022 | UPDATED JULY 27, 2022
On July 14, 2022, a group of 57 World Trade Organization member governments renewed their effort to strengthen work that is essential for the WTO to functioning properly — transparency.
They circulated the latest version of their proposal on notifications. It’s an activity most people find deadly dull, but without it the WTO’s trading system simply would not work.
The proposal is certainly the least glamorous part of the effort to “reform” the WTO, one of the priorities that WTO trade ministers set for themselves and their Geneva delegations at their June 2022 conference.
By Peter Ungphakorn POSTED JULY 4, 2022 | UPDATED JULY 10, 2022
The June 12–17 Ministerial Conference has been hailed as a rare success for the World Trade Organization (WTO) because it produced a package of new agreements and consensus statements on a range of issues, including fisheries conservation, health, electronic commerce and food insecurity.
Less attention has been paid to the Geneva meeting’s big failure. There was no outcome on agriculture. That should not be overlooked. It has implications not only for agriculture, but for members’ ability to reach consensus on really tough issues.
By Peter Ungphakorn and Robert Wolfe POSTED JUNE 30, 2022 | UPDATED JUNE 30, 2022
As a beautiful sun rose over the World Trade Organization’s lakeside headquarters in Geneva on June 17, 2022, exhausted delegates sealed a package of decisions and declarations that would give the beleaguered WTO new direction for the next couple of years.
Most of the analysis focuses on what was achieved, often with a sense of relief that the WTO was back on track, mixed with a warning that much still needs to be done.
Perhaps the biggest success was that a package was agreed by ministers, including an Outcome Document — which the previous ministerial conference failed to do.
Often missing is recognition of how hard it was to achieve this limited outcome.
Imagine. What if these viewing figures show where the WTO is heading?
By Peter Ungphakorn POSTED JUNE 21, 2022 | UPDATED JUNE 21, 2022
The World Trade Organization’s Ministerial Conference ended two days late on Friday morning (June 17, 2022), the concluding session pushed back by stamina-draining and sometimes chaotic round-the-clock haggling, drafting and redrafting.
And yet this was supposed to be a streamlined meeting. The important-sounding “plenary sessions” were scrapped, replaced by pre-recorded videos so that ministers and their delegations wouldn’t have to pop out of sessions on real substance to talk platitudes to a near-empty room.
“After the stars of the show have made their statements on the opening day — the host dignitary, director-general, guest speaker, ministers from the US, EU, and China — the plenaries retreat to a much smaller room for speeches by the rest of the ministers.
“Often the only delegates present are from the minister’s own team. The conference TV camera zooms in on the minister, leaving the empty seats invisible. Ministers may think they are making important statements for the record. No one else cares one jot, except perhaps the audience back home.”
Last week’s video statements can be watched by anyone with an internet connection and a phone or computer, anywhere in the world.
Bearing in mind that in almost all cases the texts can be read without spending time on the videos, the viewing numbers of people all over the world are not really any bigger than the in-room audiences when the statements are delivered in person.
For example, how many watched the minister usually considered to be the most powerful in the WTO, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai?
Go on, have a guess.
How many watched? US Trade Representative Katherine Tai delivers her statement
By Monday afternoon (June 20, 2022), a week after the videos were posted, 252 people had watched Tai’s video.
Two hundred and fifty-two.
And Tai’s viewing figures were the third best out of all 150 statements.
She was beaten by Nepal (267) and, wait for it …
… Grenada, with a whopping 1,897.
Yes almost two thousand people, almost 10 times the number who watched Tai, watched the statement from Grenada.
Why? Grenada didn’t even send a minister.
The statement was delivered by its Ambassador, Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, and Permanent Representative to the World Trade Organization, His Excellency Justin Sun.
If you Googled H.E.Justin Sun, you’ll have seen he’s a really big shot in cryptocurrency. He has 3.3 million followers on Twitter.
How did he become Grenada’s ambassador to the WTO?
It’s a long story. A very long story. From China via South Korea to the US and on to various jurisdictions, mainly islands. You can read it all here.
This bit is relevant:
“Sun also announced he’s now Grenada’s ambassador to the World Trade Organization, where he says he’ll advocate for favourable cryptocurrency policy.
“Because of the new title, one of his senior employees issued proper guidance to workers on Slack for how to correctly refer to Sun as ‘his excellency.’ Former employees speculated the ambassadorship is a play for diplomatic immunity. But so far, he’s most notably used his public office to promote Tron.
“Sun met with Russia’s representative to the WTO after their military invaded Ukraine and tweeted, ‘We discussed humanitarian use case of how blockchain like Bitcoin/TRON can be implemented for Russian civilians who lack access to financial payment system.’ The tweet was later deleted.
“(A spokesperson for the WTO said they were not aware of this event and thus had no comment. They also said the WTO has no right to bar any representative from meetings and they had no further comment.)”
E-commerce was a big issue at the Ministerial Conference. But if anyone watching (or reading) Sun’s statement was looking for signs of a proposal on cryptocurrency in the WTO, they would have been disappointed.
Just boring old stuff about Caribbean allies, the pandemic, and SIDS — small island developing states.
Observers of multiple World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial conferences felt gloomy early during the June 12–17 meeting, when Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala warned against mingling the issues.
She was reported to have urged ministers to make trade-offs within the same issue rather than across the package of issues.
“Sometimes, all this leveraging and cross connections between outcomes I think in the past has led to the failure to achieve anything, because then everything just doesn’t work and collapses. I was really determined from the get-go that wasn’t going to happen and I was trying to discourage members from linking one thing to another,” she said.
I was trying to discourage members from linking one thing to another
Those of us who analyse the WTO have a mental model of how members could reach agreement. When the process seems too slow, or it fails, analysts think: if the Secretariat or members could do it differently, then the obstacles could be overcome. This reasoning is counterfactual, meaning something that has not happened but might happen under different conditions.
There were a number of concrete results, which was a relief for many, but how significant are the outcomes?
By Robert Wolfe and Peter Ungphakorn POSTED JUNE 19, 2022 | UPDATED JUNE 19, 2022
In our curtain-raiser before the June 12–17 World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference — “Touch and go at the WTO. Is the director-general’s optimism justified?” — we suggested a set of score cards for assessing the result. Based on the actual outcome, we’ve adjusted the scorecards slightly and filled them in.
The scorecards are in this note. It includes an invitation to comment
Updates: none so far
Image credit: Delegates on the terrace at the WTO headquarters, Geneva, night of June 15, 2022 | WTO
The meaning of “success” is not the same for the Ministerial Conference’s organisers as it is for outsiders
By Peter Ungphakorn and Robert Wolfe POSTED JUNE 9, 2022 | UPDATED JUNE 12, 2022
How many times can a curtain go up and down? This is our second curtain-raiser for the World Trade Organization’s 12th Ministerial Conference, now rescheduled for June 12–15, 2022.
After delays in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, and more recently the threat to multilateralism posed by Russia, the fact of it happening at all will be taken as a success. But have WTO members been able to move closer to significant agreement on anything?
This time our curtain-raiser proposes some benchmarks for assessment. There’s even a scorecard at the end for anyone following along at home.
Less than two weeks before the re-scheduled World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference, two new proposals were circulated on May 31, 2022, on the most difficult subject in the agriculture negotiations — including the first from a “non-demandeur”.
The two proposals are from opposite sides on how to deal with domestic support in developing countries’ stockholding programmes for food security.
The debate in a meeting of WTO ambassadors two days later showed how far apart members still are on this with only 10 days to go before their ministers meet in Geneva. Members are now holding round-the-clock meetings to prepare for their June 12–15 Ministerial Conference
Brazil submits first ever counter proposal from “non-demandeurs” on domestic support in public stockholding
By Peter Ungphakorn POSTED JUNE 1, 2022 | UPDATED JUNE 1, 2022
Less than two weeks before the re-scheduled World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference, two new proposals were circulated on the most difficult subject in the agriculture negotiations — including the first from “non-demandeurs”.
The two proposals are from opposite sides on how to deal with domestic support in developing countries’ stockholding programmes for food security.
It’s a non-binding memorandum of understanding and Indiana itself could hardly be less interested
By Peter Ungphakorn POSTED MAY 29, 2022 | UPDATED MAY 31, 2022
“They said a US trade deal couldn’t be done. It can. We are doing it.”
That declaration by UK Minister of State for Trade Policy Penny Mordaunt is the headline on a piece she wrote on a partisan website to celebrate signing an agreement with the US state, Indiana.
But is it a “US trade deal”?
It is not with the “US”, but Indiana — a state with 2% of the US population (at 6 million slightly more than Yorkshire or Scotland), less than 2% of the US economy (GDP), and less than 1% of its area (ranked 38th of the 50 US states)
The actual “trade” content is minimal, when compared with what governments usually sign in trade agreements
“Deal” is misleading since this is not the conclusion of anything. It’s a memorandum of understanding (MoU) — or joint statement of intent — on future cooperation and on what future talks will cover. The way it’s presented stretches the meaning of “agreement” a lot.
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