Bali, Indonesia - "the morning of the world" - was the site of the WTO's 9th Ministerial Conference, which finished last Saturday.  The conclusion was a day late, but the delay was worth it.  They got a deal.  As the WTO's Director-General, Roberto Azevêdo, summed it up, "We have put the 'World' back in the 'World Trade Organization."

Gita Irawan Wirjawan is Indonesia's Minister of Trade, and it was he who served as the chairman of the conference.  Before declaring the conference closed, Minister Wirjawan highlighted some of its achievements and praised the WTO Director-General for his role in bringing about a successful conclusion.  Tomorrow we will look at some of Minister Wirjawan's comments on the substance of the Bali Package.   Today we'll stick to his praise for Director-General Azevêdo, which was centered in this paragraph:

And they did. 

Nelson Mandela died on December 5 - in the middle of the Bali Ministerial - and from that point on his words and spirit infused the conference.  One Mandela observation in particular was repeated, joyfully, many times once it was clear that MC9 would be a success: "It always seems impossible, until it is done."

That brings us to the question, how was it done?  We don't have a complete answer, but we do have a start.  It comes from the Navy's famous computer scientist, Admiral Grace Hopper.  As the Google doodle reminded us at the start of this week, she would have been 107 on Monday.  Grace Hopper too was eminently quotable.  "You manage things.  You lead people," she said.  If the thought is true for hierarchical organizations like the U.S. Navy - and we believe it is - it has even more force where the people to be led cannot be commanded.  They can only be led.

Well, in the last four months, Roberto Azevêdo has led the representatives of 159 different entities - most of them sovereign states - to unanimous support for a trade deal that has eluded them for a very long time.  Admittedly, the Bali package is but a shadow of the Doha ambition, but that in no way diminishes its significance.  For us, the core of that achievement lay in convincing large swaths of the developing world, not just to acquiesce in a set of WTO agreements, but to fight for them. 

Whether the WTO's next steps will be as successful as this last one is an open question.  Whether the WTO members chose well when they named Roberto Azevêdo to be their Director-General, that question has been answered.