WTO Was Not Meant for Us

On the first morning of 1995, the World Trade Organization opened its doors in Geneva with a promise written into its own founding document: that trade, properly organized, would lift the poorest nations along with the richest. The preamble to the Marrakesh Agreement spoke of raising standards of living, ensuring full employment, and, in language that African negotiators had fought hard to include, of "the need for positive efforts designed to ensure that developing countries, and especially the least developed among them, secure a share in the growth in international trade commensurate with the needs of their economic development." It was a beautiful sentence. Three decades later, it reads like an epitaph. This book tells the story of what happened between that promise and the present day, using Africa, fifty-four countries, a fifth of the WTO's membership, and by most measures the part of the world the multilateral trading system has served least well, as its lens. It is not a story that lends itself to a single villain or a single betrayal. It is, instead, a story about the accumulated weight of small asymmetries: who writes the rules, who can afford to enforce them, who has the staff to attend eleven meetings scheduled in the same week in Geneva, and who has one negotiator covering all eleven from a hotel room, checking three different WhatsApp groups to know which room to be in.