No one brought it down from the mountaintop on tablets. As we all know, most of the major tariff and traditional non-tariff barriers such as quotas, that is, border measures, have been dealt with. We entered a new era in the Uruguay Round, with domestic regulatory issues and domestic policy issues that have an impact on trade moving closer to center stage. That now includes areas like food safety, GMOs, anti-trust and competition policies, tax policies as exemplified by the FSC case, agricultural subsidies. Certainly there is no question that the WTO mechanism is not able, and was never designed, to deal with the challenges of environmental issues and basic labor rights.
Donkeys can carry straw.
It you put bricks on their backs, their legs collapse. Putting too much weight on the WTO is both inappropriate and a recipe for failure. I confess that I don't know the answer to these questions. But I do know that we should be putting a lot of energy into thinking outside the box and trying to develop the answers. Perhaps it is time to focus more on bilateral free trade arrangements.