As part of activities to mark Streamsowers and Köhn’s 20th anniversary last Thursday in Lagos, Nigeria, the Director General of the World Trade Organisation, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, during a fireside chat, amongst other topical issues, addressed concerns around the impact of geopolitics and global conflicts on trade, key factors that would aid the successful operation of the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement and her vision for women and youth-led businesses. Esther Oluku brings the excerpts
How has the recent convergence of geopolitics, geo-conflicts, escalations in the Middle East and Red Sea, as well as shipping disruptions impacted global supply networks and the architecture of global trade? And, what does this mean for countries with limited leverage?
I always say that the world is facing the greatest disruptions to global rules and to the multilateral trading system that it has faced in the past eight decades. There’s tremendous uncertainty, which is not good for business. And multilateralism is at the weakest that I’ve seen it in a long time meaning that organisations like the UN, the World Bank, the WTO, the IMF, and so on, and so many of the multilateral groups have been in a situation of attack where they’ve been weakened. So with respect to multilateral trade rules and multilateralism in general, the world is not in a very good place. As we have seen, there’s been a shift to more power-based rather than rules-based systems.
