A not too transparent recommendation from Mr Wolf

Sir, Mr Wolf in desperation of achieving some positive results from the “Ten days that could shake the World Trade Organisation”, June 21, is willing to put it all in jeopardy by asking world leaders to give their negotiators carte blanche since “they can do so confident that it will not haunt them: the results would only be implemented long after they leave office; and implementation of even the most controversial deals has often passed unnoticed”.

This is exactly the type of non-transparency that would make it impossible for WTO to live up in the long run to its global institutional purposes, and it reminds me so much of some privatizations I witnessed, when the order of the day was to postpone any major increases in tariffs a couple years, so that consumers would not be able to connect the dots.

It is also wrong of Wolf to hype the demands for results of the upcoming negotiations too much and even mentioning “potentially devastating consequences of failure”, as this could spill over into those disappointments that feed the self-realization of prophecies. Instead, we need to put forward the argument that independently of the results, WTO has a vital role to play since the world cannot afford to lose “a highly successful dispute settlement system” and it also needs a world-class coordinator to give support to whatever other negotiations, multilateral regional or bilateral, that could help the world to keep moving forward in the vital issues of trade.

It is strange that although Wolf tells us “Personally, I believe these rounds no longer make sense”, he should still feel the need of ordering us to bet our last clean shirt on them.