WTO Report Shows Increase in Trade Restrictions Due to Economic Uncertainty
Trade restrictions are becoming more commonplace in the wake of the economic uncertainty created by the COVID-19 pandemic, war in Ukraine and food security crisis, the World Trade Organization director-general said in an annual overview of international trading environment developments. The WTO Trade Monitoring Report said the restrictions are coming at a higher clip, especially for food, feed and fertilizers. WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala called on members to refrain from further adoption of export restrictions in an effort to salvage the global economic outlook.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
From October 2021 to October 2022, WTO members introduced more trade-facilitating measures, 376, than trade restrictions, 214. Most of the trade facilitation measures affected the imports side, while most restrictions were on exports. For the first time since WTO began tracking restrictions in 2009, export restrictions outpaced ones on imports. Furthermore, the number of trade remedy investigations sharply fell during the review period.
"Members have increasingly implemented new trade restrictions, in particular on the export side, first in the context of the pandemic and more recently in the context of the war in Ukraine and the food security crisis," Okonjo-Iweala said. "Although some of these export restrictions have been lifted, many others persist. Out of the 78 export restrictive measures on food, feed, and fertilizers introduced since the start of the war in late February, 58 are still in place, covering roughly USD 56.6 billion of trade. These numbers have increased since mid-October, which should be a cause for concern."