Africa gains as WTO delivers breakthrough deals.

In the early hours of 17 June, after several sleepless nights, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the World Trade Organisation's Director-General, stood up and, her voice rising to a crescendo, told exhausted delegates words few had envisaged would be uttered at the end of the organisation's 12th Ministerial conference (MC12): 'You stepped up and delivered in every area we have been working on.'

She then listed a package of agreements now known as the Geneva Package - covering, among others, a waiver of intellectual property protections to boost countermeasures against COVID-19, a long-illusory agreement on fisheries subsidies, and a decision addressing food insecurity.

These achievements demonstrated, Ms. Okonjo-Iweala said, that the WTO 'is, in fact, capable of responding to the emergencies of our time.'

She hailed a world in which WTO members 'can come together, across geopolitical fault lines, to address problems of the global commons, and to reinforce and reinvigorate this institution.' WTO agreements are reached through consensus and are binding on members.

Multilateralism, under attack on multiple fronts, had been given a lifesaving shot in the arm.

The triumphant outcome at MC12 was anything but anticipated. In fact, on 13 June, a day before the conference opened, Nick Dearden, a columnist for the United Kingdom's Guardian newspaper, wrote that delegates arriving for that conference would find the organisation in an 'existential crisis.'

Amid a pandemic, Mr. Dearden bemoaned, WTO members were still caviling about temporarily waiving property rights of pharmaceutical companies to allow developing countries to produce COVID-19 vaccines; and many of them were still confused about a 'common approach' to the growing global food crisis. It was time, he wrote, to 'bury' the organisation.

Pessimism about the WTO is nearly always a safe gamble. Only this time pessimism lost.

Africa's Benefits

First, there was an agreement about the definition of fish. It was no mean feat. For the past 21 years since fisheries negotiations were launched at Doha, this was one of the fraught issues. Fish, the agreement now states, 'means all species of living marine resources, whether processed or not.' The old canard that it includes 'aquatic plants' had been quietly jettisoned, almost without notice.

The agreement on fisheries also includes a curb of around $22 billion in annual government subsidies to fishers from wealthy countries who ravage African waters. In other...