Title: Humanizing the WTO: Seeking a Sustainable, Just, and Integrative Trade Agenda

Organizer: Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO)

Description: This workshop explores systemic challenges and opportunities for the trade regime, inter alia, to foster climate action, circular economy, poverty reduction, and economic fairness. Although human impacts of trade are rarely openly discussed in the WTO, justice is often implicitly assumed to be engrained in WTO principles such as the ones on non-discrimination. Still, there is a growing need for making trade policies more supportive of decency, improvement of standards of living, human rights, and environmental sustainability. The assumption underlying this workshop is that we need strengthened resilience while achieving ambitious reforms of the WTO based on connecting high-level policy discussions at the WTO with impacts ‘on the ground’. The workshop will raise concrete ideas with the participants regarding the direction WTO members could take in shaping the future of a peaceful, humane, and sustainable global trading system through holistic and integrated approaches.