Here is an excerpt from their conversation:

Roseanne Gerin:	Your paper opens with a stark assessment that modest reforms can't save the WTO. What convinced you that the institution has reached such a critical point?
Keith Rockwell:	Well, this has been some time in the making. It didn't just happen overnight. We've seen evidence of this dating back really quite some time. I think when we had governments begin to block the agendas of meetings from being approved — a standard clerical procedure — because they didn't like things that were on the agenda, that was a huge red flag. And that began to happen in 2013 to 2016. A lot of this happened. And that's what gave rise to the plurilateral approach, which I know we'll talk about later. But I would say this has been the case. It was in the very beginning, the WTO was seen as this all-powerful, monolithic entity that would be involved in every aspect of our lives, which was never the case, but people saw it in that light. And so that led to a lot of very negative and, I would argue, even paranoid responses to what was going on, and that made it more difficult to move the organization in a productive direction.
Roseanne Gerin:	You write that WTO members have been unable even to agree on what reform means. Why has defining reform become so politically fraught?
Keith Rockwell:	Trade is political. That's what it comes down to. If you look at it, for example, from the point of view of development, many developing countries think that the WTO can best help them by exempting them — these countries — from all of the WTO rules into perpetuity. And if that's the case, then it makes one wonder what the point of belonging to the WTO is. If you look at the question of consensus, for example, you can see why all the members believe that you need to preserve consensus, because you can protect your rights. But when consensus is used as a means of blocking negotiations to which you are not even participating, it becomes a distortion of what it was intended to be. So there needs to be some form of modification. They're never going to do away with consensus whole hog, but there needs to be some way of using it in a way that does not create problems of the like of which we've just been seeing.

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