Thanks your comment. I read with interest your take on ‘the chain of causality’ You are closer to the arena of action than I am; and your take on the situation is the subtlety that is not so apparent from my vantage point. With the clarity that you have provided, it seems to me that causality per se is not so much the issue, but ‘motive’: more specifically, reactionary motive – because WTO is there and it is behaving the way it is, one wants to kill it off. And that may be true for the TPP and TTIP and the likes, but not necessarily so for the likes of EPA and PACER Plus. You have implied that in your comment as regards the latter.

The EPA and PACER Plus negotiations are pivoted around the WTO provisions and principles – GATT Article XXIV etc. Furthermore, WTO even sanctioned the PACER Plus CTA to absent himself from Geneva to help out the FICs negotiate this FTA.

‘Killing off the WTO’ by those behind the new plurilateral agreements is thought-provoking. One would think that they want to kill off the Organization as is and not so much the multilateral idea behind it. And I suppose when people talk about the ‘death of multilateralism’, that is probably what they are talking about.

Barry, I would certainly encourage this conversation. I suggest that we take full advantage of this medium.

Kind regards. Kaliopate

However, I do not agree with the chain of causality in the article. It is not the case that the death of multilateralism has resulted in a spate of plurilateral agreements, most notably the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and, on a more limited scale, PACER Plus. Instead, it is the reverse. These regional agreements have been designed to marginalise and kill off the WTO. Once a network of plurilateral agreements are in place, the US and EU will have achieved their aim of entrenching corporate rights into international treaties, without having been required to tackle their distorted agricultural subsidies and other trade distortions. Then they will have no need of the WTO.

So the appropriate response for WTO members is to refuse to sign these regional agreements that erode the rights that they have fought for and won in the WTO, and re-focus back on fundamental reform of the WTO into trade forum that is ‘fit for purpose’ for the 21st Century. Such as system would look very different that the one we have, but it is vastly preferable to abandoning multilateralism in favour of a system that reflects the interests of the US, EU and Japan (and Australia and New Zealand in the case of PACER Plus), and locks in rights for multinational corporations.

Barry Coates, former Executive Director of Oxfam New Zealand and Green Party Aotearoa candidate.