World Trade Organization Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala says today’s trade system is under extraordinary strain and needs to be redesigned rather than discarded. In the season-two opener of Bloomberg’s Leaders with Francine Lacqua, she links the pressure to trade wars, geopolitics and fragile supply chains.
Her answer is “re-globalization”: diversify production and supply chains across more countries instead of concentrating them in a handful of locations. That fits patterns BitcoinVersus.Tech has already covered in Apple’s shift toward India, the U.S.-China tariff escalation and intensifying Europe-China auto competition.
The interview is also personal. Okonjo-Iweala revisits her anti-corruption work in Nigeria and the abduction of her mother, which Bloomberg presents as tied to the reform battles she fought while in government. The episode frames that experience as part of her approach to leadership under pressure.
The larger policy debate is active now. The WTO’s 2026 World Trade Report says roughly 72% of global merchandise trade still moves under WTO most-favored-nation terms and estimates that failure to modernize the system could reduce global output by up to 10% by 2050. That supports the central distinction in her argument: reform global trade rather than retreat from it.
Editor’s Note: “Re-globalization” is the WTO’s policy framing. The output estimate above is a WTO scenario, not a guaranteed forecast.
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