WTO | News – Speech – DG Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

Thank you, Ambassador H.E. Dr. Adamu Mohammed ABDULHAMID (NIGERIA) for your introductory remarks.

Excellencies, ladies, and gentlemen. I am pleased to join you today to discuss the latest WTO-wide Trade Monitoring Report and take stock of recent trade policy developments.

You all will have seen my Report which was circulated to Members on 20 November, in document WT/TPR/OV/27 and its Addendum. 

You are all familiar with how the Report is prepared and our efforts to ensure inclusiveness and transparency in delivering this factual overview of trade policy developments over the past 12 months. The Trade Monitoring exercise is there to assist you, the Members, to get a sense of developments in the trading system that stand out, to understand emerging trends, and to undertake a constructive, non-legal peer review on matters of shared concern.  

You have seen the Report, so I will not list its findings – I am more interested in hearing what you have to say and listening to you engage on the substance of the trends and developments identified since October 2023. However, allow me to share with you a few of my main take-aways.

Let’s start by acknowledging something we all know, which Ambassador Adamu just referred to: the global trading environment appears increasingly fragile, uncertain and precarious.

But to be clear, trade has shown resilience to all the shocks of recent years, to Members’ benefit. And I really want to stress this: amidst all the difficulties we have, and this is what I have been saying as I have travelled around, let us also remember that trade has shown quit a bit of resilience. In October, our economists reported that the volume of world merchandise trade had expanded at a moderate 2.3% year-on-year pace in the first half of 2024, on track to grow by a projected 2.7% for 2024 as a whole, and 3.0% in 2025.  This represents an improvement over the 1.1% decline in merchandise trade volumes seen in 2023. And these projections are in line with the projections for global GDP growth. Normally, trade grows faster than GDP and this time we are growing in tandem.

Nevertheless, the resilience we have seen – we have to admit –  looks fragile, amid geopolitical tensions and the unilateral measures described in this report. Conflict and climate change continue to cause human suffering, while disrupting trade and economic activity. And as the IMF recently observed, the trading system routinely gets blamed for trade imbalances that are largely the product of domestic macroeconomic forces within leading economies. In other words, in some big economies we have a domestic consumption problem, while in others we have an excess of savings problem. Yet the fact is that trade remains an important part of the solution to the challenges of our time – from accelerating growth and job creation, to ensuring food security and tackling climate change. That is why we need to shore up the rules-based trading system – to reform and re-invent it to withstand the current pressures and keep delivering for people everywhere, and for the planet. This has consistently been my message to you, and it was at the core of what I said to G20 leaders in Brazil last month.

Turning to the Report’s findings, let me start with the good news, because it’s so easy to overlook the fact that there are genuine positive developments. For instance, Members continue to introduce liberalizing measures. Trade-facilitating measures introduced during the 12 months leading up to the middle of October – measures such as tariff reductions, simplified import procedures, and the removal of quantitative restrictions – covered an estimated USD 1,4 trillion worth of traded goods. Moreover, that amount is up almost half a trillion dollars from the USD 977.2 billion covered by trade facilitating measures in the previous reporting period, from October 2022 to 2023.Another positive trend comes from services trade:  the report finds that the majority of the 134 services-related measures introduced over the past year were trade facilitating.

Now for the not-so-good news. The Report shows that during the 12 months leading up to mid-October, the value of trade covered by the -169 new restrictions was USD 888 billion. That’s half a trillion dollars more than the value of trade covered by restrictions introduced in the preceding year, which was USD 337 billion.

In addition, there is little meaningful roll-back of existing trade restrictions. That means the stockpile of trade restrictions continues to grow.  As of mid-October 2024, the stockpile of import restrictions in force was affecting an estimated USD 2.94 trillion  representing 11.8% of world imports. That too is half a trillion dollars more than the comparable figure from last year’s report, which was USD 2.48 trillion, almost 10% of world imports.

Export restrictions are also gaining momentum.  In the 12 months leading up to mid-October, export-restrictive measures covered almost USD 277 billion in traded goods – well above the USD 159 billion covered by such measures introduced during the previous reporting period. The accumulated stockpile of export restrictions since 2009 is estimated to affect 3.2% of world exports, worth about USD 786 billion. An important silver lining here is that our tracking of export restrictions on food, feed and fertilizers put in place since the start of the war in Ukraine in late February 2022 shows that these have decreased significantly, today covering an estimated trade value of USD 11.8 billion, down from almost USD 30 billion a year ago.

The Report also describes the latest developments on issues including trade remedies, economic support measures, the phase-out of COVID-19 related measures and the increase in trade concerns reported across WTO committees.

Before closing, allow me to also to reiterate that the Trade Monitoring Exercise is only as strong as Members want it to be. Your participation is crucial and you recognized this at the 7th Appraisal of the TPRM last year.  I thank all those that have participated and urge all delegations to help us strengthen this transparency exercise. As requested by you, efficiency, inclusivity, and transparency remain at the core of the WTO’s trade monitoring work, and we will keep up our efforts to improve.  

Unfortunately, I cannot stay with you all this afternoon, but DDG Hill will be my eyes and ears. I look forward to hearing about your exchanges and suggestions.

Thank you. 

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