But here is the paradox: Despite years of protest, negotiation, and coalition-building, countries from the Global South have been unable to reform World Trade Organization rules that systematically prioritize the well-being of the United States and others in the Global North at the expense of the Global South. Trump’s actions may inadvertently accomplish what Global South countries have been trying to do for decades and force a fundamental reckoning with the WTO.
My introduction to the WTO’s role in stifling the Global South’s agricultural and economic development came in 2003, when I sat in a crowded coordination meeting in Somalia. Donors, United Nations agencies, international nongovernmental organizations, and a few local organizations, including my own, were present.
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At one point, a Somali NGO leader stood up, his voice trembling with grief and frustration. He pleaded with the international community to stop dumping food aid in his region in Southern Somalia. He said the constant flood of free food — mostly grain from the United States — was destroying local farmers. Even worse, he explained, the distribution system was controlled by cartels linked to warlords, who profited from aid contracts and used the proceeds to fuel ongoing conflict.
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His plea was met with indifference — and even smirks.
Years later, I would find research confirming what he said: that for much of the 1990s and 2000s, food aid distribution in Somalia became a lucrative business run by private cartels, some with ties to armed groups. And on a later visit to Northern Somalia, I would see the absurdity of the current system up close. There, locals told me that they had indeed received food aid from the World Food Programme but couldn’t eat it. They had no machines to grind the grain. And so during a historic hunger crisis, some families were feeding the US-donated grains to their livestock — because they couldn’t consume it themselves.
That’s when I began to grasp what was really happening: This wasn’t just a flawed aid system — it was exploitative trade policy in disguise. The food sent to Somalia was subsidized surplus from American farms. It didn’t come because it was culturally appropriate or logistically efficient. It came because the United States had too much of it and needed to dump it somewhere.
I had recently joined Adeso, formerly Horn Relief, where I am currently executive director. We were piloting one of the first large-scale unconditional cash transfer responses in Somalia. We believed cash was a more dignified, effective, and appropriate solution to local food shortages. It respected local knowledge and allowed people to decide for themselves how they could best survive and recover.
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But our biggest opposition came from where we least expected it: the UN and international NGOs. They pushed back fiercely, warning that cash couldn’t be tracked or trusted, and that people would misuse it. What I came to understand was this: Cash didn’t fit the system they had built — a system centered on farmers in the United States, procurement contracts, warehouses, and food pipelines. It wasn’t about what communities needed.
Meanwhile, under WTO rules, Somalia and other Global South countries were barred from protecting their own agricultural sectors. Export subsidies are technically prohibited under WTO rules, but food aid is the loophole. By “gifting” surplus food through USAID and WFP, the United States avoids penalties while distorting local markets and displacing local farmers.
In Haiti, for example, US pressure forced the government to slash rice tariffs, opening the floodgates to subsidized American rice starting in 1981. Haitian farmers could never compete. Three decades later, Bill Clinton admitted: “It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it was a mistake.”
Similarly, in West Africa and Brazil, more than $2 billion in US cotton subsidies crushed local cotton farmers. When these countries protested through the WTO, their cases took years — and even when they won, they often waited a decade or more for compensation.
This is what the WTO has facilitated for decades: a system designed not to protect fair trade, but to protect the interests of the richest countries. Even the World Bank admitted in 2001: “The richest countries … developed a system of trade rules that benefit themselves at the expense of the poorest.”
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America’s new tariffs could be just the push needed to usher in a post-WTO era in which we can build a trade system that better reflects the needs of the Global South. We may now see countries successfully accelerate efforts to bypass the WTO, build regional trade frameworks like the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), and strengthen BRICS (an intergovernmental organization comprised of 10 Global South countries working on global governance reform) as counterweights to Western dominance.
America’s new tariffs might finally do what diplomacy could not: undermine the legitimacy and functionality of the WTO to the point that it becomes irrelevant.
