Questions are being raised about the present day relevance of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) established in 1995 subsequent to Trump administration’s massive tariff upgrades on all countries the US trades with, paused for some countries by deferrals.

WTO website identifies its objectives as operating “the global system of trade rules and helps developing countries improve their capacity to trade. It also provides a forum for its members to negotiate trade agreements and to resolve trade problems they face with each other.

The overall objective of the WTO is to help its members use trade as a means to raise living standards, create jobs and improve people’s lives.” There are three obvious challenges to these grandiose claims from the perspective of developing countries, including Pakistan.

First, the relevance of trade rules formed during the unipolar world are clearly no longer applicable today – rules made when the globalists predominated and supported free movement of peoples (an objective visibly abandoned by the US and European countries as they shut their borders due to a massive influx of immigrants, ironically a sizeable number attributable to Western political interference in their countries leading to crippling civil wars) and goods (with poor countries reliant on multilateral borrowing compelled to ease import restrictions in spite of severe balance of payments’ episodes).

Pakistan as a case in point pledged in the Memoranda of Economic and Finance Policies of the first review dated May 2025 under the ongoing Extended Fund Facility (EFF) programme: “Building on our efforts during the Stand By Arrangement (nine months long – July 2023 till after February 2024 elections) to remove distortive import payment restrictions, we will maintain an exchange system free from restrictions on payments and transfers for current international transactions and in accordance with our commitments.” The removal of these “distortive restrictions”, an IMF condition, accounts for an import bill nearly 4 billion dollars higher in 2025 compared to the year before (a prelude to balance of payment crisis in the past) though it did allow access to funds from other multilaterals and bilaterals (including 16 billion dollar roll-overs from........

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