(Bloomberg) -- World Trade Organization members agreed to reappoint Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as director-general for a second term, cementing her in the job for another four years that are expected to be fraught with tariff disputes led by US President-elect Donald Trump.
The former Nigerian finance minister — the first woman to run the Geneva-based trade body — will begin her next term on Sept. 1, the WTO said in an emailed statement Friday.
Petter Ølberg, a Norwegian diplomat who chairs the General Council, which handled the selection process, said Okonjo-Iweala’s reappointment was made by consensus with “every member in support.” No other candidates were put forward to run against her.
During her first stint at the helm of the WTO, Okonjo-Iweala won some plaudits for mustering smaller victories like the routine extension of a moratorium on tariffs on e-commerce, for efforts to widen vaccine distribution during the pandemic, and for championing free trade during a period of rising tariffs, export controls and other barriers to international commerce.
But larger deals, like a global crackdown on subsidies for fishing fleets that are depleting stocks of marine life and an investment facilitation agreement, have moved slowly.
Owing partly to a more protectionist world where multilateralism is under threat, her mixed record has made it difficult for the nearly 30-year-old WTO to shed its reputation as a forum for exhaustive talks among 166 economies that struggle to reach consensus.
In the previous US election year of 2020, the first Trump administration supported a different candidate, the then-South Korean Trade Minister Yoo Myung-hee. That slowed the selection process into early 2021, when the White House of newly elected Joe Biden backed Okonjo-Iweala and she got the job.
‘Get to Work’
The US contributes the largest share of the WTO’s budget of any individual country, followed closely by China, according to the latest annual report.
US Trade Representative Katherine Tai said in a statement released Friday that Okonjo-Iweala “has demonstrated a strong commitment to the work and future of the organization.” She said Washington supports “strong and continued collaboration with the director-general to find necessary paths forward to achieve substantive and procedural reform of the WTO.”
During a press conference in Geneva, Okonjo-Iweala said she “very much” looks forward to engaging with the incoming Trump team and is ready to “get to work” on a busy agenda.
Trump’s nominee to be USTR, Jamieson Greer, was chief of staff under former USTR Robert Lighthizer, a fierce critic of the WTO who has advocated universal tariffs. Greer spelled out his views on trade policy in testimony to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission back in May, though his positions on WTO governance and its mission are less clear.
Running Unopposed
Okonjo-Iweala’s current term started in March 2021 and will expire on Aug. 31.
The WTO’s mission of fostering lower trade barriers is at odds with Trump’s threats of universal tariffs and his embrace of protectionism.
The announcement of Okonjo-Iweala’s reappointment came on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the so-called Battle of Seattle in 1999, when tens of thousands of anti-globalization demonstrators disrupted talks at the WTO’s third ministerial meeting in an early display of internet-fueled activism.
They marched in defiance of a global trading system many of them believed was being designed with WTO rules to favor large corporations at the expense of the world’s poor economies.
(Updates with US comment in ninth paragraph)
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.