Trade ministers gathering to reform the WTO risk starting from the wrong premise. The WTO’s dispute system is impaired, but its core functions remain active. Reform should build on what still works – not start from a false premise of collapse.

When 166 trade ministers meet later this month to discuss reform of the World Trade Organization, they will be told repeatedly that the institution they are trying to fix is already dead.

The latest obituary appeared recently in Foreign Affairs, where former US Trade Representative Michael Froman wrote that “the global trading system as we have known it is dead” and that the WTO has effectively ceased to function.

The argument has become familiar. Since 2019 the WTO’s Appellate Body has been unable to operate after the United States blocked the appointment of new judges. Without a functioning appeals mechanism, critics argue, the rules-based trading system can no longer enforce its obligations.

It is a dramatic claim. It is also profoundly misleading.

This misconception reflects a deeper misunderstanding of the institution itself. The WTO is often portrayed primarily as a court whose central function is dispute settlement. It is something far broader: a system of governance for managing trade relations among nations through rules, monitoring, committees and negotiation.

The problem with the ‘WTO is dead’ narrative is that it focuses almost entirely on a single institutional component while ignoring the vast amount of everyday work that continues inside the organisation. To judge the health of the WTO solely by the fate of the Appellate Body is rather like declaring a hospital closed because one department is temporarily shut.

Having spent nearly two decades directing various divisions in both the GATT and the WTO Secretariat, I have seen first-hand how much of the organisation’s work takes place far from headlines.

Consider the facts.

No country has ever withdrawn from the WTO. On the contrary, more than 20 governments are currently negotiating accession. If the institution were truly moribund, countries would hardly be lining up to join it.

The WTO also remains the central forum for managing the day-to-day frictions of global trade. More than 30 standing committees meet regularly to oversee the implementation of agreements covering everything from technical barriers to trade to food safety and agricultural subsidies.

These committees rarely attract public attention, but they are where much of the practical diplomacy of trade policy occurs. Members raise concerns, clarify rules, and often resolve problems before they escalate into formal disputes.

The WTO is often described as a court, but most of its work takes place in meeting rooms rather than hearing rooms.

Transparency and monitoring – two of the organisation’s most important functions – also continue uninterrupted. Through the Trade Policy Review Mechanism, members systematically examine each other’s trade regimes, providing a level of peer scrutiny that few international institutions can match.

Even dispute settlement has not disappeared.

Consultations and panel proceedings remain active, and several members have established alternative arbitration arrangements to ensure that disputes can still reach binding conclusions. The system is impaired, but it is far from defunct.

Meanwhile, the broader WTO framework continues to accommodate the evolving architecture of world trade. More than 400 regional trade agreements have been notified under its rules. Plurilateral initiatives covering areas such as the regulation of trade in services and digital commerce are advancing among groups of willing members.

All of this occurs with a budget that is astonishingly modest by the standards of global economic governance – reportedly smaller than the annual travel budget of the International Monetary Fund.

None of this means the WTO is free of problems. The negotiating function has struggled to produce major multilateral agreements. The dispute settlement system clearly requires reform. And geopolitical tensions are increasingly spilling into trade policy.

These challenges are precisely why ministers are now discussing reform.

But if the debate begins from the mistaken premise that the WTO is already dead, there is a real danger that reform efforts will focus narrowly on rebuilding the system from the top down — redesigning dispute settlement while overlooking the institutional foundations that already work.

That would be a serious mistake.

The WTO is not a single mechanism but a complex network of committees, monitoring processes, negotiated rules and dispute procedures built over more than 75 years.

Reform should therefore begin from the bottom up.

Strengthen transparency. Support the committee processes that quietly defuse trade tensions. Encourage plurilateral cooperation where consensus proves impossible. And gradually restore a dispute settlement system that commands broad confidence among members.

More than 70 per cent of world trade still takes place under WTO rules. In an era of geopolitical rivalry, tariff wars and economic fragmentation, that framework remains indispensable.

Predictions of the system’s demise are not new. In the early 1980s the economist Lester Thurow famously announced at Davos that the GATT – the WTO’s predecessor – was finished. Yet within a decade governments launched the negotiations that created the WTO itself.

Indeed, the WTO remains one of the most remarkable achievements in modern international cooperation. As Martin Wolf, Chief Economics Commentator at the Financial Times wrote in a contribution to one of my books, the WTO represents “the most remarkable achievement in institutionalised global economic cooperation that there has ever been”.

That achievement should not be casually dismantled.

When the world’s trade ministers meet to discuss reform, they would do well to remember that the WTO is not dying. It is doing what other international institutions have done in the past – struggling, adapting and eventually reinventing themselves.

In short, what the trading system needs today is not a requiem but a rebirth.