Meeting current challenges: The job at hand for the WTO.

• Date: 01 October 2020
• Author: Wolff, Alan Wm.

Before 2020, the closest our species came to a truly shared experience was the landing of the first human being on the moon. That changed, and in a horribly negative way with COVID-19. In early April, more than half of the global population was under some sort of lockdown. People everywhere feared for the health of their loved ones and worried about their own economic prospects.

The pandemic has already claimed close to 1.5 million lives. Promising vaccine trials give strong hope that there is light at the end of the tunnel, but there has been a lot of loss, a lot of damage - and the storm has not yet passed.

In economic terms, COVID-19 has provoked the worst drop in economic output since the Second World War. The International Labour Organization estimates that the equivalent of 495 million full time jobs - or about 17.3% of the global total - were lost between the end of 2019 and the second quarter of 2020. Only about half of these losses are on track to be made up by the end of this year. Years of progress on hunger and poverty reduction have already been reversed, and the pandemic threatens to widen social and economic inequalities of every kind.

Women in particular have borne...