Sarah Thorn is the Director for International Trade at Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., and the chairman of the Board of Advisors for the Global Business Dialogue.  Today's quote was a remark she made in a conversation we had earlier this week.  The topic that gave rise to it was the WTO's newly minted Agreement on Trade Facilitation.  One of the points Ms. Thorn was making is that moving goods across national borders is the essence of trade, and that is what trade facilitation is about.  As such, it is trade policy stripped to the bones and unencumbered by some of trade policy's more contentious elements.

Because of its prominence and importance to the WTO's recently concluded ministerial conference in Bali, trade facilitation accounted for a great deal of the discussion at GBD's colloquium earlier this week at McDermott Will and Emery.  That session served as a look back at the Bali Ministerial.  John Murphy of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was one of the speakers.  Arguably the single most effective voice for American business in Bali, Mr. Murphy offered this perspective on trade facilitation at Tuesday's colloquium:

Those comments from John Murphy were part of his larger discussion of the significance of the Bali Ministerial and the future of the WTO.

It was Jay Eizenstat, a partner at McDermott, Will and Emery, who devoted his entire presentation at Tuesday's GBD colloquium to trade facilitation.  Among other things, Mr. Eizenstat did a rough breakdown of the agreement in terms of the nature of the commitments it contains.  It was an effective way of answering the question: Are these real obligations or simply aspirational ideas?

"It is by no means just a hortatory agreement," he said.   By his count, there are 104 things that WTO members "shall," that is, are obliged to do, such as promptly publishing information on "importation, exportation, and transit procedures."

As Mr. Eizenstat put it:  "This is not 'Do it if you feel like it; do it if you can afford it.'  This is, 'You better do it because, at some point down the line, you're going to be subject to dispute settlement if you don't.'"

In the last entry we compared trade facilitation to the winglets on big jets.   We may be overdoing the flight analogies here, but still we want to note something about the date of last Tuesday's colloquium.  It was December 17, 2013, which was the 110th anniversary of the Wright Brothers famous flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903.  It is amazing how quickly the reality of flight developed after that: just 66 years from Kitty Hawk to footprints on the moon in July 1969. 

We strongly suspect that, as countries around the world implement the obligations of the Trade Facilitation Agreement, new worlds of opportunity will open - especially in developing countries.  And those new opportunities are bound to outstrip any current estimate of their value.

We are not convinced, however, that this is an agreement solely about developing countries.  It will not surprise us at all, for example, if both the complainant and the respondent in the first dispute settlement cases under the Trade Facilitation Agreement are developed countries.  But that is a long way off.