The director general of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, is expected to serve a second term at the head of this institution after the candidate nomination process was closed without the presentation of another candidate for the position.
The WTO is a forum where new trade rules are negotiated or the updating of those that already exist and that are applied between the 164 member countries of the organization, in areas as sensitive as agriculture, an area in which no significant progress has been achieved in the last twenty years due to the divergent interests of the countries.
Okongo-Iweala, Nigerian economistwill complete his first five-year term as director general on August 31 and everything indicates that he will join a second after having received clear signs of support from the majority of member countries – particularly developing countries – at the beginning of the process. selection of candidates.
The president of the General Council of the WHO, the body that brings together the ambassadors of the member countrieshas indicated that he will inform you in the coming days what the next steps will be in the election process with a single candidate.
The great task of the WTO is supervise that countries comply with their legal obligations in trade matters and that fair competition is respected, and in this field it also offers countries a space to resolve their commercial disputes, whether amicably or through a mechanism similar to arbitration.
However, this last role has been seriously diminished for some years because the appeal instance of your dispute resolution system is not working since the end of 2019 because the United States has since blocked the renewal of its referees.
Washington considers that it has exceeded its functions and that some of his rulings have gone against American sovereignty.
The re-election of donald trump to the presidency of the United States represents a additional challenge for the organizationsince in his first term he already threatened to withdraw his country from this institution if it did not undertake the reforms that he considered necessary, although his criticism at that time was not limited to the WTO but reached a whole series of international organizations.
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