WTO asked to address ‘non-market’ practices

US Trade Representative Katherine Tai on Friday called for meaningful progress in making changes to the World Trade Organisation by a ministerial meeting in February, with better tools needed to handle China’s “non-market” practices.

The US was committed to a reformed WTO that was focused on its “foundational goals”, marked by “openness, transparency, and fair-market-oriented competition”, Tai said in remarks to a trade forum in Washington.

She said that in recent years, the WTO has failed to address non-market practices by some countries, seeking to “dominate key industrial sectors, promote national champions and discriminate foreign competitors, massively subsidise key sectors and manipulate cost structures.”

Her remarks did not name China directly, but she later said she was referring to China. “These practices are unfair and disadvantage workers in developed and developing countries, like the very people this system should be empowering and lifting up,” Tai said at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies event.

“Real conversations” were needed on how the WTO can address issues, Tai said.

The 13th Ministerial Meeting of the WTO is scheduled for February 26-29 in Abu Dhabi. Tai called on the trade body’s 164 member countries to “lock in” any reforms where they can find consensus, “rather than continue to preserve an unsatisfying status quo until some theoretical point in the future where we agree on everything.”

Read World trade on rise despite tensions

The WTO is a consensus-based organisation where any member country can block proposals, and negotiating rule changes has proven extremely difficult since its 1995 founding.

WTO Director Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala insisted that the trade body’s members were working through tough negotiation and said she was hoping for reform, including to the dispute settlement system, by February.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 24^th, 2023.

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