Last year, on International Women's Day, the WTO community was treated to a special event. Two prominent women in the global economy came together for a candid conversation about women's economic empowerment, gender balance in the workplace, and more. The discussion with Christine Lagarde, who serves as the President of the European Central Bank, and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director-General of the World Trade Organization, was moderated by CNN International's Eleni Giokos. The event was held...

Food safety is a collective responsibility. Producers, businesses, , governments, and international agencies all contribute to ensuring that the food consumers receive is safe to eat. In this podcast episode, our guest, Francis Chama of York Farms, a Zambian agricultural producer, sheds light on how his company tackles the issue of pest management. Adherence to sanitary and phytosanitary measures is key to accessing export markets explains Simon Padilla of the Standards and Trade...

The people of Tonga, a Small Island Developing State in the Pacific, know a thing or two about living with natural disasters. In 2022, their archipelago was first hit by a giant volcanic eruption and then went through a prolonged period of drought. Farmer and entrepreneur Minoru Nishi Jr is not prepared to give up on expanding his export activities in the face of natural hazards. Minoru is joined in this episode by Esterlina Alipate, a Tongan trade official who currently is with the Institute...

Digitally transmitted services are the fastest-growing segment of international trade. They offer huge opportunities for SMEs in emerging markets and developing economies. But how do you convince potential clients that you offer cutting-edge IT services when your country is mainly known as an exporter of pineapples and coffee? In this episode we talk to Albán Sánchez, an IT entrepreneur from Costa Rica who decided that the way to deal with outdated perceptions of his country was to establish...

Cocoa is an important export crop for West African countries. Yet, many of the smallholder cocoa farmers struggle to earn a decent livelihood. Assata Doumbia, president of the ECAM cooperative in Côte d'Ivoire, applies a mix of strategies to obtain higher and more predictable incomes for her fellow farmers. The cooperative works with trusted international partners, invests in improving productivity and enables women to join the workforce. Assata even tackles the challenge of moving up the...

Lack of information about export procedures is a known obstacle to trade for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. But there are learning tools available to get newcomers started. Confronted with the need to cut costs during the pandemic, Natali Tjahjadi, Operational Manager of CV Triguna Widya, a garment manufacturer in Bali, Indonesia, took things into her own hands. In this episode, Natali talks about her learning experience and the thrill she gets from successfully handling...

In the face of recent crises in geopolitics, public health, and the environment, are people better served by the fragmentation of trading relationships or by a new kind of globalization? The WTO’s World Trade Report 2023 tackles the debate head on, as presented by Chief Economist Ralph Ossa.

Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados, delivered a thought-provoking Presidential Lecture on "Reinventing the global order" at the WTO in March 2022. In her speech, she explored how the rules-based trading system can be part of the solution to the major problems facing the world today. In her introductory remarks, WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala had this to say: "She is fearless. She speaks truth to power on issues like climate justice, vaccine inequity, sovereign debt and the...

Without rules and referees there would be no game. Each football match is policed by a referee who has full authority to enforce the law of the game. In multilateral trade, we have plenty of rules but no all-powerful referee to supervise them. The ultimate control on trade disputes remains with the WTO members themselves. In this episode of the Trade Goals podcast, Michael Roberts and Antonia Carzaniga look at how football and trade disputes arise and how they are resolved.

Football video games are popular wherever people have access to the internet. The games are part of the much larger e-sports universe of competitive video gaming. In this episode of the Trade Goals podcast, Michael Roberts and Antonia Carzaniga explore how playing the beautiful game in a virtual format brings together the different strands of trade law dealing with merchandise goods, services, and intellectual property.

Football fans' love of the game generates plenty of revenue. The major sources of income in football are merchandising, sponsoring and broadcasting rights. All of these rely on intellectual property (IP) rights. In this episode of the Trade Goals podcast, Wolf Meier-Ewert and Jana Borges cast light on how the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, also known as the TRIPS Agreement, enables players, clubs and football associations to monetize their IP through...

A football game is a service and the clubs that are organizing football matches are providing recreational services. International trade rules may apply when the players on the pitch come from different countries, when a club is foreign-owned, when matches are broadcast internationally or when fans travel abroad to watch their favourite teams play. In this episode of the "Trade Goals" podcast, Markus Jelitto and Antonia Carzaniga explore how the WTO’s Services Agreement (the GATS) applies to...

An incredible amount of work is needed to create a perfect football pitch. A lot of international trade is involved, too. In this episode of the "Trade Goals" podcast, players rave about fast pitches, tournament organisers praise robust playing surfaces and seed industry representatives explain how international phytosanitary standards facilitate trade in turf. We will also touch upon the gender dimension of playing on the best possible pitch.

Footballs are an indispensable item in the global value chain of the beautiful game. Manufacturing, distributing and selling the balls is a complex international business. It is difficult to pinpoint where in the world a ball is actually made because the sourcing of raw materials, the design and the production happen in different countries. But one thing is certain: WTO agreements play an important role in easing trade in footballs. WTO experts Roy Santana, Michael Roberts and Úna Flanagan...

There is probably no group of people who will talk with more passion and expertise about trade-related aspects of the game of football than soccer enthusiasts within the WTO. In this first episode of "Trade Goals", we introduce a group of WTO pundits with deep knowledge in realms such as trade in goods, trade in services,  trade-related aspects of intellectual property and communications who talk about what football means to them, both personally and professionally. Throughout the podcast...

International trade has progressed enormously since the founding of the WTO in 1995. The world trades a lot more – from just over 5 trillion dollars' worth of goods in 1995 to more than 22 trillion dollars in 2021. The world also trades in new ways - e-commerce accounts for more than 20 percent of total retail sales worldwide. Supply chains have also revolutionized trade, leading to the rise of products made "in the world". Despite this radical transformation, the WTO and the rules of trade...

Even in less stressful times, agriculture talks at the WTO tend to be difficult and highly emotional. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how important fundamental questions regarding food and health are to all of us. Complicating the situation have been developments such as the war in Ukraine and droughts resulting from climate change, both which are contributing to immediate and longer-term concerns about food insecurity. Listen to Ambassador Gloria Abraham Peralta of Costa Rica,...

It was the most hotly debated issue in the run-up to MC12 and at the very last minute, negotiations nearly broke down because of a footnote. The issue was the WTO's intellectual property response to the COVID-19 pandemic, commonly known as the TRIPS waiver. There is good news to report in this episode as WTO members agreed at MC12 to waive certain requirements under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) making it easier for developing countries to...

Our ocean, the planet's largest ecosystem, is endangered by overfishing. What's the WTO got to do with it, you may ask. By prohibiting harmful fisheries subsidies that contribute to overcapacity and overfishing, WTO members agreed to play their role in the sustainable use of marine resources. Listen to Ambassador Santiago Wills of Colombia, the chair of the fisheries subsidies negotiations at the WTO and to Sainabou Taal, legal expert at the WTO Secretariat, explaining the importance of the...

When ministers and other delegates filed out of the World Trade Organization's Council Room on 17 June, night was giving way to dawn in Geneva. WTO members had just gavelled a historic package of results after five and a half days of intense and sometimes fraught negotiations. Let's Talk Trade looks at the outcomes produced during the Twelfth Ministerial Conference and how they came about. In this first episode, Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala gives an overview what is being called the...

In this season finale, we ask WTO Deputy Director-General Anabel González: are you worried? She helps us navigate through the ongoing "polycrisis" of inflation, the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical conflicts, and climate change, and marks out the pathway for more resilient supply chains.

Larger economies and businesses may already be finding their way to absorb the shocks of the supply chain crisis, but that is less the case for smaller players. We throw the spotlight on developing countries and micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises who find themselves bypassed by major trade arteries and at risk of being priced out of the markets. The episode features Sebastiano Iorio of Cargo Compass SA, Sushant Palakurthi Rao of Agility, Kanwar Usman of the International Cotton...

We hold up a mirror to another important link in the supply chain: us, the consumers. How have our shopping habits changed during the pandemic and will we see lasting effects on trade, thanks in part to technology? The episode features Jessica Moulton, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company, Sushant Palakurthi Rao of Agility, three stories of consumer woes, and soundbites from the WTO Global Supply Chain Forum. WTO Senior Analyst Emmanuelle Ganne provides key insights.

Whether by air, road, or sea, in this episode we hear how all these trade channels had their share of disruptions as part of the global supply chain crisis. The episode features Lars Mikael Jensen of Maersk, Clemence Cheng of Hutchison Ports, Matthias Maedge of the World Road Transport Organisation, and Carlos Grau Tanner of the Global Express Association. WTO Counsellor Nora Neufeld provides the analysis.