Indian businesses should brace themselves for upheavals in their most generous international benefactors, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which supervises the rules underpinning global trade. The organisation will choose its first woman Director General at the end of October, just days before the fateful 3 November presidential elections in the US. She will have bagged the worst of all the top jobs in international agencies. The two finalists are South Korean trade minister Yoo Myung-hee and Nigeria's former finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. Both are acceptable to the US, since it wants a plaint leader who will not interfere with President Donald Trump’s plans for bone-rattling top-down reforms to WTO. In recent years, India has been a leading player in WTO affairs and has fought tooth and nail to protect Indian interests -- especially in intellectual property, service industries and small businesses in agriculture. For a while, it was blamed for the failure of the Doha round of trade negotiations after more than 10 years of heated struggles. But it is more pragmatic now. Future Indian trade successes will belong to businesses backed by the strength of India's economy and the muscle of trade diplomats. Indian businesses are unfortunate in these regards. India is a rising political power but has a weak economy. It is likely to be ground down by intense trade battles among the big three trading powers – the US, European Union and China. Expect it to be assailed on all fronts, including agriculture, services, intellectual property, public procurement, manufactures and red tape. Indian businesses should keep close watch on their trade diplomats because WTO’s survival depends on profound systemic reforms. The reforms will strike at the core of trade regulations that opened great power aspirations for India by taking advantage of WTO’s support for globalisation, poverty reduction and development. President Donald Trump wants to change WTO rules to force China to end its state-support for companies and state-subsidised manufacturing. They are deemed unfair for US businesses that rely mostly on the private sector and private investments. Underlying these goals is genuine fear of China’s rise as a canny technology, services and manufacturing aggressor that could seriously challenge America’s economic influence around the world. That would give respectability to China’s authoritarian one-party governance system compared with conflict-ridden US democracy. Trump wants to use WTO reforms to nip these in the bud because trade is a central driver of China’s rise.
