B. 1NC Low evidence also says that the WTO facilitates international trade. That’s key to every existential risk and turns case.
Richard Baldwin and Dmitry Grozoubinski 22, Dmitry Grozoubinski is the Executive Director of the Geneva Trade Platform within the Graduate Institute, as well as the founder of ExplainTrade, a trade and negotiations consultancy, Richard Baldwin is a Professor of International Economics at IMD Business School in Lausanne, the Editor-in-Chief of VoxEU.org, which he founded in June 2007, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, 06/2022, ERIA, “Strengthening the Multilateral Trading System: the ‘WTO Rising’ Imperative”, https://www.eria.org/uploads/media/Books/2022-G20-New-Normal-New-Technology-New-Financing/16_Ch.12-Multilateral-Trading-System-WTO-new2.pdf, RMazhankou
The World Trade Organization (WTO) – which was built around yesterday’s consensus to tackle yesterday’s challenges – is being pushed to breaking point by the entrenched disagreements of today. It will need reimagining if it is to rise to the 21st century challenges confronting humanity. And rise it must. The great trials confronting humanity imperil lives, not just livelihoods. Climate change, the pandemic, and persistent economic inequalities threaten to tear communities apart, spark social upheavals, and foster extremist politics within nations. Between nations, the same factors create strife that may lead to a fractured global economy, to commercial wars, or even real ones. What does trade and the WTO have to do with this? Trade is not the only thing we need to tackle these problems, but there will be no solutions without trade. We cannot fight climate change, repair the economic and health damage caused by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), or redress economic inequality unless goods, technology, data, expertise, services, and capital move from nations where they are abundant to nations where they are scarce. This is exactly what trade does. International commerce is driven by arbitrage that moves things from where they are abundant, and thus relatively cheap, to where they are scarce, and thus relatively dear. Much more international commerce will be needed to solve the existential problems. However, the required trade growth will not happen without a high-performing multilateral trade system to provide certainty and to smooth inevitable frictions. This, in turn, requires a WTO that has the status, the clout, and the resources it needs. Call it the ‘WTO rising’ imperative.