What is the future of the WTO and what is Africa’s place in that? Is there an African agenda for WTO reform? What should its’ tenets be? This paper provides critical reflections on what Africa’s core score in the WTO reform debate should be. It proposes approaches that learn from Africa’s engagement in the close to 25-year life of the WTO. Overall, it argues that the main challenge for Africa in the WTO is to ensure that the system is restructured to yield an effective response to the structural weaknesses in African economies.
Africa’s engagement in the work of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been largely shaped by the dynamics in the Doha Development Agenda of trade negotiations. This strategy worked fairly well when the institution’s own focus was on updating the multilateral rulebook. But the tide has shifted. The talk is reform. And while negotiations and their outcomes are a part of that conversation, the more pressing issues are systemic: institutional functionality, disputes, effectiveness in responding to 21st century trade concerns, and others.
What is the future of the WTO and what is Africa’s place in that? Is there an African agenda for WTO reform? What should its’ tenets be? This paper provides critical reflections on what Africa’s core score in the WTO reform debate should be. It proposes approaches that learn from Africa’s engagement in the close to 25-year life of the WTO. Overall, it argues that the main challenge for Africa in the WTO is to ensure that the system is restructured to yield an effective response to the structural weaknesses in African economies.
While it might be easier for Africa prepare the nuts and bolts of a response strategy to reform proposals from other WTO Members, this will not be the most optimal strategy. After all, the 17 years and counting of the Doha negotiations have gifted Africa the art of perfecting negotiation response skills.
Rather, what will be truly game changing is to get, through WTO reform, a systemic overhaul of how trade capacity building is conceptualized, planned and rolled out for Africa. A new generation trade capacity building programme, focused on productive capacities, will take Africa out of its current spectating role– gazing at those with capacity who continue to transform the lives of their people through opportunities in international trade.
In today’s world, in which WTO Members have, as part of the global community, committed to use trade as a means for implementation of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) – it is no longer sufficient to say that the WTO is not a development agency – a retort that many that have interfaced with the multilateral trading system from the development perspective would have heard severally. The period of WTO reform is the perfect opportunity for Africa to situate the WTO in its true development context – as an institution which, per the preamble of its’ own founding document, works for the attainment of sustainable development.
It is hoped that the ideas presented here can trigger a debate on how the WTO can more effectively tackle the SDG challenge. For it is well understood by many analysts that the battleground for whether the fight will be won, or lost, is in Africa.
The paper commences with a background that chronicles some of the broader issues in the reform process. Through an assessment of utilization rates, it finds that while Africa is a beneficiary to several preferential market access schemes, the continent remains a marginal player in global trade. It zones in on what we call the bottom line: that the cog in Africa’s wheel of beneficial integration into global markets is weak trade capacities. Removing this requires a syndicated structural response to boosting Africa’s capacity to trade. The paper proposes how the WTO could go about this and concludes with a reiteration of key messages.