DDG Nordquist: Trade continues apace, showing resiliency

Supply chains have rerouted and adapted, with trade growth continuing to defy expectations, she told forum participants.

"At the start of 2025, WTO economists projected that trade growth would be negative and instead, it grew 4.6 per cent for the year, significantly outpacing global GDP growth, with 72 per cent of worldwide trade still occurring under most-favoured nation rules.  Partners may be changing within the top trading economies, but trade has still been occurring and adjusting to a 'new normal.'" 

WTO members have to recognize the reality that trade policy "no longer sits in a separate box" and that governments are pursuing different industrial strategies, climate objectives, resilience and economic-security objectives, DDG Nordquist argued. 

"One man's protectionism may be another's economic security," she noted.  The question for the trading system is how do these different governance and economic models coexist without creating unnecessary barriers, discrimination, or damaging  economies.

This is where the WTO can make a difference, by improving transparency through improved notifications, promoting dialogue and reforming its rulebook, which is more than three decades old.

"We need to be realistic," DDG Nordquist said.  "In the current environment characterized by geopolitical tensions and lack of trust, a grand multilateral bargain is hardly possible." 

"But that does not make the WTO less relevant. In some ways, it makes the basic functions of the WTO more important," through its common foundation of rules,  inclusiveness and its infrastructure for transparency, monitoring and dialogue.

A successful WTO "does not require solving every disagreement among 166 members," but rather showing that members with very different interests and economic models can still cooperate and produce better outcomes than fragmentation, she concluded.