So what if the WTO is wobbly? Don’t dismiss the potential of plurilateral pacts among willing nations

Like the ministerial gatherings in 1999, 2003 and 2017, the 14th Ministerial of the World Trade Organization (WTO), held at Yaoundé, Cameroon, ended without an agreement on anything. US trade representative Jamieson Greer used the occasion to reiterate his long-held view that the WTO is not of much use. This trade body operates by consensus and India has had its fair share of blame for such huddles yielding little, having held firm on its right to subsidize agriculture, a point that rich countries found hard to stomach.

This time, the big tussle was over the extension of a moratorium on digital commerce tariffs, with the US and Brazil as the principal adversaries. A plurilateral pact is in the works to keep digitally transmitted stuff duty-free—led by the EU, which has invited other members to sign up for it. Such plurilateral deals have the advantage of bypassing the WTO’s system of consensual decision-making.

There is no bar, though, on its members forging pacts among themselves in breakaway groups. Another agreement of this kind being thrashed out is aimed at investment facilitation. Like Brazil, India was glad to see the WTO’s no-tariff rule on digital trade lapse; New Delhi views such duties as a sovereign right.

But it has also taken a broad stance against plurilateral deals, arguing that these exceed the scope of the WTO framework. Principled as this sounds, it amounts to making the best the enemy of the good. The WTO has been crippled ever since US President Donald Trump refused, in his first term, to fill vacancies in the appellate authority over its dispute settlement mechanism.