Is this weekend’s Ministerial Conference a ‘turning point’ for the WTO and will it take a joint EU-CPTPP intervention to save it?

Trade ministers from around the world are landing in Yaoundé in Cameroon for the biennial World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference (MC), the 14th that’s been held since the formation of the Geneva-based body in the early 1990s.

Reform of the multilateral rules-based order for trade, which the WTO oversees, is going to be the major topic of discussion throughout, following years of disagreement among the WTO’s 166 members about how it should function. The US has been the most notable disgruntled party, having threatened to leave during the Trump presidency.

The other key discussion points include:

• Reform of the dispute settlement process
• Level-playing field rules and subsidies – including fisheries
• The incorporation of the 2024 Investment Facilitation for Development Agreement
• Agricultural trade rules
• And the biennial question of whether to extend the 25-year e-commerce moratorium – an agreement among members to refrain from imposing customs duties on electronic transmissions

While these topics will be familiar to anyone who’s followed previous MCs, the urgency with which these issues need to now be addressed has only increased since MC13, particularly with US President Donald Trump having returned to the White House last year.

"MC14 will be consequential for the organisation," WTO director general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has told delegations.

"It is what I call a 'Turning Point Ministerial', one in which we can show that the organisation is up to the job of taking criticism seriously and using this to reposition itself."

Low expectations and a ‘strange’ atmosphere

Yet, despite this claim, MC14 will be greatly overshadowed by the US-Israel war with Iran and the disruption that conflict is causing global trade. The Strait of Hormuz, the channel through which 20% of the world’s energy exports transit, remains largely closed.

“Expectations were low for the WTO MC even before the current crisis,” David Henig, director of the UK Trade Policy Project at the European Centre for International Political Economy, told Global Trade Today (GTT).

“With governments now even more distracted, they are unlikely to be prioritising outcomes from it.”

Speaking to GTT from Yaoundé, George Riddell, managing director at Goyder and a senior adviser at Flint Global, said it was a “strange moment” for the conference to be taking place. Yet, despite four of the Gulf region’s WTO members not being able to send delegations this year due to the conflict, he noted that it is still “set up to be a significant MC”.

“Countries are at least still engaging, and much trade continues under WTO rules, so there is still some upside,” added Henig.

Has the US softened its tone?

Trump’s longstanding scepticism about the WTO has been an almost existential cause of concern for the body. His policy of imposing wide-ranging, WTO rule-flouting tariffs since returning to the White House in 2025 has only reinforced this. His administration also tried to block the original appointment of Okonjo-Iweala in 2020, has continually blocked appointments to the WTO’s appeals court and has also withheld membership payments.

Yet, the US hasn’t yet withdrawn from the body and continues to engage with WTO reform - it circulated a reform paper in WTO headquarters in December 2025.

“The US has, since the beginning, been a leader of the WTO – and we intend to continue to engage and to be a leader for reform” a senior US official recently told Politico.

It is notable as well that the WTO wasn’t on the list of multilateral bodies that the US announced it would be withdrawing funding from in January. This list included the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The US also paid the WTO the US$25m it owed in overdue contributions last year.

“It is incredibly nuanced,” said Riddell of US-WTO engagement.

“There’s the high-level rhetoric that it doesn’t care, it views the WTO as a talking shop that’s not fulfilled what it was meant to do, and that there’s all sorts of problems with the organisation.

“But on the other hand, the reciprocal trade and investment agreements it’s signed have WTO commitments written into and underlying them.

“Whether it’s on technical barriers in the trade space, sanitary and phytosanitary standards, commitments to permanent moratoriums on electronic commerce, and even in a couple of cases promising to ratify WTO fisheries agreements – there’s a lot there.”

Henig is more circumspect, saying that recent engagement doesn’t so much reflect a “softening of the US tone” but more a “lingering hope that they can still set the rules for others while not feeling bound themselves”. On the US’ recent proposals on how to change the WTO, Henig adds that these “offer no real basis for reform”.

Most Favoured Nation under fire

In its reform paper, the US effectively declared the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) principle – under which WTO members must apply the same tariff rates to all the other 165 members unless a separate preferential agreement is in place – as “unsuitable for this era”. The MFN rule has been central to the multilateral system since the WTO was established.

However, the US critique is not as controversial as it may once have been, with EU trade commissioner, Maroš Šefčovič, writing in the FT in January that a “frank discussion” was needed on the link between MFN status and levels of market openness among WTO members. Šefčovič’s argument could be seen as a thinly veiled admonishment of China, which the US has long accused of benefiting from the MFN principle without having sufficiently opened its markets to other WTO members.

China has had Special and Differential Treatment (SDT) benefits since officially joining the WTO in 2001, based on it having had developing country status at this time. This has allowed it to have more leeway than other WTO members to set higher tariffs and offer greater subsidies to protect its own industries from overseas imports. Chinese exports have meanwhile benefited from MFN rates in other WTO countries.

China has said it will forgo SDT benefits in future WTO deal negotiations in a bid to counter US-led criticism. A former Chinese trade diplomat told Reuters that he hoped this would "put an end to the current debate about the rebalance of rights and obligations among major players of the WTO, at least for China”.

That said, Li Yihong, a senior delegate at China's mission to the WTO, said the move did “not involve any change to China's status as a developing country and in the WTO as a developing member, whether within the WTO framework or in any other context”, adding:

"China remains a key member of the global south and will always be a developing country.”

China will want to see the MFN principle and wider WTO rulebook maintained, Riddell says.

“Certainly, they want to keep a lot of the development-related benefits and easements that they have,” he said.

“China has, in effect, rejected the US paper and defended current WTO rules, making it more difficult to see how a reform package could emerge,” said Henig.

Global South needs MFN predictability

And China won’t be the only developing country wanting to see MFN rules maintained. Riddell notes how MFN provides “high levels of predictability, transparency and market access” for countries.

A recent ‘Global Trade Update’ from UNCTAD stated that this predictability is key for trade between developing countries, or ‘South-South trade’ in reference to the ‘Global South’ grouping. The report states:

“Trade between developing countries – known as South–South trade – has expanded rapidly under the multilateral trading system, rising from about US$500bn in 1995 to US$6.8trn in 2025.”

Rather than altering MFN, the UNCTAD report calls for reforms that instead “strengthen mechanisms that help developing countries integrate into global markets, diversify exports and move up the value chain”. It also calls for an enhancement of SDT benefits for developing nations, as well as a resolution to the US-instigated malfunctioning of the WTO’s dispute settlement system:

“Reviving a fully functioning dispute settlement system is essential to maintaining fairness and predictability in global trade”.

Commenting on what a world without MFN might look like, Henig said it would be a “more uncertain one, where tariffs can change at whim and on a regular basis. That would be a poor basis for growth in the future”.

The UK’s facilitator role

The UK is refraining from completely endorsing the US’ proposals for now.

A spokesperson from the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) said, in an email to GTT, that the government does welcome the US proposals, as it would any suggestion for reform from a member of the WTO. However, they said the UK would need to listen to the US concerns further to better understand them.

Trade minister Sir Chris Bryant is in Yaoundé and is serving as one of the six facilitators at MC14 – the first time the UK has had this role as newly-independent WTO member following Brexit.

“The UK is proud to take on a facilitator role for the first time, with minister Bryant serving as one of the six ministerial facilitators guiding the critical discussions on WTO reform,” the DBT spokesperson said.

“When questions about the effectiveness of the multilateral trading system are growing, the UK will do its part to strengthen this system, which is so critical for businesses, investors and consumers, to ensure it doesn’t slide into irrelevance.” 

A new CPTPP-EU coalition?

Bryant could use this role to help convene a new coalition of nations backing the rules-based order for trade independently of the US and China.

On the morning of the first day of MC14, a report in Politico included quotes from the minister that supported the idea of the EU getting closer to the 12-nation Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) – a trade grouping of Pacific nations that the UK joined in 2023.

CPTPP counts Japan, Australia, Mexico and Canada among its members. Canadian prime minister Mark Carney has offered to “broker a bridge” between the group and Europe. These comments came after his Davos speech in January that urged like-minded nations to “build a new world order” in the wake of Trump’s rebuke of the multilateral system through tariffs.

“I think Canada has added a bit of oomph into this conversation since Mark Carney’s speech,” Bryant told Politico. CPTPP and EU diplomats have told the political news site that the two blocs are preparing to make a joint statement at MC14 on WTO reform “if we don’t manage to get an ambitious one in the multilateral sphere”.

Whether a CPTPP-EU coalition manages to reform the WTO or whether it sees that a new basis is needed for the rules-order of trade remains to be seen, but there’s clearly an appetite to address the multilateral system independent of the US and China.

In the meantime, the EU and CPTPP are already in talks around a rule of origin agreement that would more closely interlink supply chains among member states. Deals like this would serve as “a direct rebuke to the Trump administration, and proof that a critical mass of the world’s leading economies can come together to create genuine stability in global markets,” said John Ferguson, global lead of the Future of Trade initiative at Economist Impact, to Politico.

Ecommerce moratorium

One issue that the EU, CPTPP, China and the US are likely to agree on at MC14 is the desire to extend the WTO e-commerce moratorium – an agreement among WTO members to refrain from imposing customs duties on electronic transmissions.

The main objectors to this agreement at previous MCs have been India and Indonesia, but it’s expected that they will be persuaded to continue to support it in Yaoundé.

“In past MCs the e-commerce moratorium has been extended as India has been persuaded to do so, and there seems to be a reasonable chance that the same will happen again,” sad Henig.

“If this does not happen then many countries have already committed not to raise duties on electronic transmissions, but there will be uncertainty that this could happen.”

The DBT spokesperson also told GTT that the UK is seeking a permanent extension to keep the costs down of digital content, including software and digital music.

“It’s never over until the fat lady sings, but the indications are that there will be an extension,” says Riddell. He adds:

“We don't need tariffs on services. We already have all this chaos out in the world with more tariffs on goods. We see what chaos that's causing for businesses, the costs for the end consumer. We don't need the same starting for services.”

Will MC14 be a turning point?

There are big issues to be discussed at MC14, as there are at any WTO conference. The Trump presidency, war in Iran, debate over Chinese SDT status, and a possible new coalition of the EU and CPTPP countries make this a particularly significant event in terms of the long-term trajectory of the Geneva-based body.

That said, negotiations at the WTO are notoriously drawn out – unsurprising given there’s 166 nations involved.

Riddell notes that, in terms of tangible outcomes, the business community will certainly be expecting to see the extension of the e-commerce moratorium, while hoping for “a credible plan for reform”.

Whether this plan will come forth, who it will come from, and who will back it, are the big questions that will almost certainly continue to be asked well beyond this weekend.