The World Trade Organization (WTO) needs a strong leader at the forefront to urgently resume the delayed negotiations and update the rules of global trade for the 21st century, said Mexico’s candidate to lead the body.
Jesús Seade said that if elected as the new CEO, he would apply decades of experience as a trade negotiator to attack long-standing stagnations on issues such as electronic commerce and the depletion of the oceans by intensive fishing.
“I think people agree that we need a strong personality” to address bottlenecks, Seade told Reuters in an interview in which he outlined ideas for fixing the WTO’s dispute resolution mechanism, blocked by the United States. .
He added that it would be respectful of the nature of the group but would put pressure on countries to resolve differences, in contrast to restraint which, at one extreme, he said, ran the risk of reducing the CEO to a “worthy butler, ensuring that meeting rooms are available. “
The WTO will be without a leader on August 31, after the current director general, Roberto Acevedo, announced that he would resign a year before his term ends. The body aims to elect a new chief for November. Seade, currently Mexico’s undersecretary of Foreign Relations for North America, is among the eight candidates.
The WTO is in perhaps the worst crisis in its 25 years of existence, hit by the Trump administration’s mistrust of multilateral organizations, friction between the United States and China and the collapse of its dispute resolution system.
Seade, a founding deputy director general of the WTO who has also worked at the International Monetary Fund, said the crisis was so dire that there was now an opportunity to push the organization to act.
He added that a quick decision on leadership would help wrap up the fisheries and other negotiations with a view to starting new talks next year on issues like agriculture and allowing time to organize a delayed ministerial conference in 2021.
To restore America’s faith in the dispute resolution mechanism that Washington accuses of overreaching, he said members could consider a stronger oversight system to ensure the powerful appeals body does not stray beyond its mandate.
“The WTO is in a really desperate situation, a difficult situation, it takes the best and most suitable person to dig it up,” he said. “We are not in a situation where we can have some kind of learning curve.”
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