BUENOS AIRES: Trade ministers looked set to wrap up their biennial World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting without having reached a single agreement on Wednesday, still reeling from criticism brought by the United States, once the WTO’s driving force.

The ministers gathered in Buenos Aires were never expected to agree great reforms, with relatively minor and unrelated proposals on the table, including discussions on fishing subsidies and e-commerce.

But a discordant intervention by US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer on the first morning effectively left the conference adrift, since the WTO requires consensus – unanimity among all 164 members – to reach any agreement.

Even the perfunctory joint ministerial statement looked uncertain.

Driven by President Donald Trump’s “America First” strategy and a preference for bilateral deals, the United States had already blocked ambassadors from drafting a text in Geneva, rejecting references to the WTO’s central role in the global trading system and to trade as a driver of development.

WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell told reporters that the chairwoman of the conference, Argentina’s former foreign minister Susana Malcorra, was still hoping to get ministers to agree on one text later on Wednesday.

"There still seems to be significant gaps. Whether they can find wording that can bridge those gaps I don’t know,” Rockwell said.

The failure to reach any major deals means that negotiations on the same topics will continue into 2018, with no deadline and no heavyweight ministerial momentum to get agreement. “It’s very appropriate to stay at this stage that we are in a forward-looking mode,” Rockwell said.

“The focus of most of the work here is on work programmes, and while there is disappointment that we couldn’t get a little further in terms of concrete outcomes, being able to nail down an effective work programme is very important.”

Published in Dawn, December 14th, 2017