“This is an unprecedented time for global trade,” Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said in an interview on Bloomberg Television with Francine Lacqua. “We are seeing disruptions to trade, emerging fragmentation, in a way we’ve not seen since really eighty years.”

The body has been under intense scrutiny as US President Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again tariffs on trading partners challenge WTO norms and provoke questions about how the three-decade-old organisation operates.

“Many members of the WTO are beginning to feel that the rules no longer work for them,” said Okonjo-Iweala, a former Nigerian finance minister.

Conflict in the Middle East has also disrupted critical sea routes for vital supplies of fuel, sparking an energy crisis and hammering home the need for diversification.

“Instead of being dependent on one geography or one place,” production should be decentralised to other places with a comparative advantage, Okonjo-Iweala said. It won’t be easy “but the world needs to begin now and there’s some of that happening,” she said.

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