Editorial | Most consequential talks since Uruguay Round

With the Biden administration having cleared the logjam to her accession as the director general of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has little time to bask in the other firsts she has achieved with this job. She will be the first woman and the first African to head the WTO, having previously been Nigeria’s first female finance minister.

Her term is for four years. Mrs Okonjo-Iweala will, however, have far less than that to prove that she has the political skills to nudge the WTO members towards a revival of the organisation and avoid the frustration that led her predecessor, Brazilian Roberto Azevêdo, to throw in the towel last August, a year before the end of his term. It is an assumption that she possesses these qualities – on which Mrs Okonjo-Iweala also sold herself – why WTO members accepted her over South Korean Trade Minister Yoo Myung-hee, the preferred choice of the United States under Donald Trump.

If these expectations play true, and Mrs Okonjo-Iweala has the persuasive powers to break the inertia at the WTO, the next four years, and beyond, will be a busy period in global trade talks. In that regard, Jamaica, in its own right, and as the Caribbean Community’s (CARICOM) lead on international trade matters, has no time to waste in articulating its concerns and determining its strategies and tactics for these negotiations.

The departure of Donald Trump, and Joe Biden’s declared commitment to multilateralism, will make negotiations easier, and the survival of a rules-based global system, which is in the best interest of small countries such as those in the Caribbean, more likely. Indeed, the Americans, under Mr Biden, can be expected to be sympathetic to one of Mrs Okonjo-Iweala’s priorities – having the WTO “play a stronger role in bringing solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic on the health side, but also on the economic side”. She has suggested that the WTO would work with global institutions to ensure that poor countries have access to vaccines that have been developed to fight the coronavirus, but has not offered a model for the cooperation.

OBAMA STARTED THE PROCESS

However, instinctive empathy with multilateralism and softer tones in Washington do not mean that the Biden administration will, as it did with Mrs Okonjo-Iweala’s elevation, repudiate all the actions of its predecessor at the WTO. Indeed, while Trump totally gummed up the organisation’s dispute-resolution arrangement by blocking the appointment of new judges to its appeal body, Barack Obama started the process with objections to new appointments. That eliminated the possibility of a quorum for appeal panels when the terms of existing judges expired during Mr Trump’s tenure.

Moreover, the US, under Republican and Democratic administrations, have argued, despite the statistics on the rulings being decidedly in its favour, that the tribunal has been biased against America. More fundamentally, the United States argues that the appeal body has misinterpreted its role, by making law rather than strictly interpreting the rules as laid out in WTO agreements.

Further, while Mr Biden has said that the United States will outcompete China in technology and global trade as they fight to economic and geopolitics ascendency, Washington has misgivings that Beijing should continue the terms on which it entered the WTO. It also claims that China manipulates the systems, as well as cheats in global trade. It will want rules changed to address these perceived loopholes.

JAMAICA MUST BE PREPARED

Without a counterbalancing force, these issues, and the shift to bilateralism that characterised the Trump era, could suck attention from the concerns of developing countries, whose expected gains from globalisation have not materialised. Indeed, the Doha Round of negotiations that were to address the issues of emerging economies collapsed without an agreement.

In this regard, Jamaica and its CARICOM partners must begin to identify the issues they want on the WTO’s agenda and seek out like-minded countries, which will mostly be in the global South, with which to make common cause. For the danger, in the absence of such alliances and vocal engagement at the talks, will be small countries like ours being left to the sidelines in this new era of trade negotiations.

It is to our chagrin that global trade issues of this type seemingly get little attention from Jamaica’s Government. They appear not to be at the core of policy discourse. Yet, barring failure at the outset, the imminent trade talks will be the most significant since the Uruguay Round and the creation of the WTO itself.

Jamaica must be prepared. That preparation must include full dialogue with all stakeholders, including the private sector.