Oil trade and the WTO.(Letter to the editor)

Uri Dadush and Julia Nielson's "Governing Global Trade" (December 2007) provides a valuable account of most of the key issues facing the multilateral trading system. However, I find it disappointing that the authors failed to discuss the desirability of bringing the governance of international oil trade within the scope of the World Trade Organization (WTO). There is no doubt that, de jure, petroleum falls within WTO jurisdiction, as it fell under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). De facto, however, the supply quotas that members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) impose to raise prices have never been challenged under WTO rules. Nor have the liberalization commitments negotiated by OPEC countries acceding to the WTO apparently ever covered such quotas, most notably in the recent case of Saudi Arabia.