The Director-General, World Trade Organization (WTO), Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, on Tuesday called for reforms of the 30-year-old institution, highlighting its consensus rule that requires unanimous agreement among members to secure global trade deals.
“We need to reform the system, we cannot be complacent,” Okonjo-Iweala told the Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh, according to Reuters.
“We need to reform some of the ways we do business, like our consensus decision-making system, which is practised as unanimity – everyone has to agree – so it really slows down decision-making,” she said.
She also urged the WTO’s 166 members to engage with the United States on its criticisms of the watchdog, many of which she acknowledged as valid.
Okonjo-Iweala repeated that the global trading system was undergoing the biggest disruption in eight decades, describing it as “battered but not broken”.