By Dr Samar Verma*
Global South Needs India’s Smart MC14 Strategy
As the World Trade Organization’s 14th Ministerial Conference approaches, the central question is no longer whether the multilateral trading system is under stress. That is already evident. The more consequential question is whether the WTO’s Ministerial Conference (MC14), to be held between March 26–29, 2026 in Yaoundé, Cameroon, can still restore confidence that the system remains capable of serving development, especially for the Global South.
The World Trade and Development Report 2026, published by Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS), frames the moment as one in which the “already significant and rapidly expanding stake of the Global South” in trade and trade rules can no longer be treated as peripheral to WTO reform. The Consumer Unity & Trust Society (CUTS) compilation of articles by eminent experts on trade policy, published since September, 2025 under the tag line ‘TradeOff, prepared in the run-up to MC14, makes a complementary point: India’s choices will matter not only for its own trade future, but for the credibility of a more inclusive WTO.
That is the right frame for MC14. For many developed economies, the WTO may increasingly be one forum among several. For much of the Global South, it remains fundamental: the only universal, rules-based arena in which weaker countries can still negotiate, contest, and occasionally constrain the preferences of stronger ones. CUTS rightly notes that, for the developing world, the WTO has historically functioned as a safeguard against rules being dictated solely by the powerful. If that function weakens further, the costs will not be borne evenly.
The empirical backdrop is worth recalling. The WTO’s World Trade Report 2024 shows that, since the mid-1990s, global per capita income rose by about 65 per cent, while per capita income in low- and middle-income economies nearly tripled. Their share in global trade also expanded significantly, and trade between developing economies rose from a marginal share of world merchandise trade to a far more consequential one. Yet the same report cautions that trade has not benefited all economies, regions, and groups equally, and that openness must be complemented by domestic policies if its gains are to become more inclusive. That dual insight is crucial: trade matters, but the quality of rules and the distribution of policy space matter just as much.
For the Global South, then, MC14 is not merely a diplomatic event. It is a test of whether multilateralism can still accommodate development asymmetries in a world shaped by fragmented supply chains, renewed industrial policy, contested digital governance, and weakened dispute settlement. India enters this moment with unusual strategic weight. It is simultaneously a major economy, a leading voice of the developing world, a country with significant domestic development needs, and an increasingly important actor in trade diplomacy beyond the WTO. That combination gives India influence, but also responsibility.
The CUTS compilation usefully argues that India’s role at MC14 will be judged not only by what it resists, but by how it leads. This is a persuasive proposition. India has long defended policy space, special and differential treatment, and the concerns of poorer members in areas such as food security and digital trade. Those concerns remain valid. But the compilation also suggests that an exclusively defensive posture is becoming harder to sustain in a trading system that is already moving, however unevenly, toward variable geometry and selective rule-making. The challenge for India is therefore not whether to abandon principle, but how to translate principle into constructive statecraft.
Agriculture will remain a core test. The RIS report underscores that agriculture sits at the intersection of trade regulation, food security, rural livelihoods, and wider development concerns, and that the inability of the WTO to produce development-responsive outcomes has gradually weakened confidence in the institution. For much of the Global South, public stockholding is not a technical aberration in need of disciplining; it is part of the social contract. The same report characterises public stockholding as sitting at the intersection of food security, rural livelihoods, domestic price stabilisation, and macroeconomic stability in grain-dependent economies. For India, where food security programmes serve vast numbers of vulnerable citizens, this is not a negotiable abstraction. It is a developmental imperative.
But that is precisely why India must lead from the front at MC14. Leadership on food security today requires more than reiterating established positions. It requires coalition-building with Africa, least developed countries, and other food-importing or agrarian economies around a realistic permanent solution that commands wider legitimacy. The RIS report notes that proposals from the African Group and others are already pushing in this direction. India would be well placed to help turn that energy into a broader development coalition rather than a narrower defensive bloc.
The same logic applies to fisheries subsidies. The RIS volume argues that MC14 must balance sustainability with equity, especially because fisheries are not only environmental assets but livelihood systems in developing economies. India’s own circumstances make this argument compelling. In such sectors, the real developmental issue is not whether disciplines are needed, but whether they differentiate adequately between industrial overcapacity and small-scale subsistence fishing. Here again, India’s voice is likely to carry greater legitimacy when it is framed as part of a broader Global South developmental consensus rather than as a singular national exception.
Where the debate becomes more delicate is on plurilaterals, interim dispute settlement, and newer rule-making tracks such as e-commerce and investment facilitation. The CUTS compilation does not argue that India should simply sign on to everything. Rather, it repeatedly advocates strategic flexibility, selective participation, and conditional engagement. That is a more sophisticated position than either blanket resistance or automatic alignment.
Indeed, one of the more useful suggestions in the RIS report is that developing countries should approach plurilaterals, case by case, with clear criteria, safeguards, and institutional guardrails. That should be India’s operating doctrine at MC14. The key concern for the Global South is not that every plurilateral is inherently illegitimate. It is that unchecked proliferation can absorb institutional bandwidth, marginalise unresolved development mandates, and reduce the bargaining power of countries that were never adequately represented in agenda-setting to begin with. India is right to remain attentive to those risks. But it may no longer be strategically wise to respond through categorical opposition alone.
On dispute settlement, the CUTS essays are unusually candid in suggesting that India may need to revisit its posture. One contribution argues that joining the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement (MPIA) would not require India to abandon its principled position on restoring the Appellate Body; rather, it could signal commitment to preserving rules-based adjudication during an interim period of institutional dysfunction. That argument deserves careful attention. For the Global South, weakened dispute settlement does not create strategic freedom so much as institutional vulnerability. In a world where unilateralism is increasingly normalised, smaller and middle economies need legal recourse more, not less.
Digital trade is another area where India’s role will be scrutinised closely. The CUTS essays acknowledge that India is not opposed to digital trade per se, but seeks to preserve regulatory autonomy, fiscal stability, and policy space. That position is consistent with the WTO’s own 2024 report, which argues that new opportunities in digital trade require complementary domestic capabilities and cannot be made inclusive by trade rules alone. For the Global South, this is a central point. Digital integration without digital capability risks becoming another channel through which value is concentrated elsewhere. India’s experience with public digital infrastructure gives it unusual credibility in this debate. It can speak not only as a cautious negotiator, but as a country that has actually built inclusive digital public architecture at scale.
Yet external strategy alone will not suffice. One of the strongest threads in the CUTS volume is that India’s multilateral ambition must rest on stronger domestic foundations: more professional trade-policy capacity, closer trade- industry coordination, better state-level ease of doing business, and more coherent supply-chain strategy. This aligns closely with the WTO’s broader conclusion that open trade must be supported by domestic policies that enable structural transformation and wider inclusion. Put differently, India’s effectiveness at MC14 will depend not only on what it says in Geneva or Yaoundé, but on whether it can convincingly show that its own development strategy is outward-looking, competitive, and institutionally prepared.
There is also a wider geopolitical context. The CUTS compilation points to BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (now expanded)) and other non-WTO platforms as complementary spaces through which India can navigate a fragmented global order. That is true, but such forums are supplements, not substitutes. For the Global South, an adaptable WTO remains indispensable because it alone combines universality, legal structure, and developmental legitimacy. The proper objective for India, therefore, should not be to choose between multilateralism and strategic alternatives. It should use its growing influence across multiple forums to reinforce a development-sensitive multilateral core.
The real opportunity at MC14 is for India to move from being seen mainly as a defender of old mandates to becoming a shaper of the next development bargain. That means remaining firm on agriculture, food security, livelihood concerns, and policy space. It also means being open to calibrated participation in reform, to coalition-building across issue clusters, and to offering credible proposals instead of only procedural objections. As one contribution in the CUTS compilation puts it, India must decide whether it wishes to remain a blocker of outcomes or a “co-architect” of what comes next.
For the Global South, that choice matters enormously. A more flexible yet still inclusive India could help prevent the trading system from sliding into managed fragmentation. A more passive or purely veto-oriented India, by contrast, may preserve tactical space in the short run while narrowing strategic space for poorer countries over time.
MC14 will not resolve every contradiction in the multilateral trading system. But it can still clarify direction. If India uses the moment wisely, it can help ensure that the future of trade governance is not written only by those with the greatest economic power, but also by those with the greatest stake in fairness, inclusion, and development. That would not only serve India’s national interest. It would also be a meaningful service to the wider Global South.
*Dr Samar Verma, PhD, is a senior economist, public policy professional and an institution-builder, with 28 years of experience in economic policy research, international development, grant management, and philanthropic leadership. Views are personal.
