Over the past few years, there has hardly been any doubt that the multilateral trading system being governed by the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been facing an existential crisis. This rather uneasy feeling was reinforced in Buenos Aires in December 2017, after the 11th Ministerial Conference (MC11) ended without taking decisions on any of the issues on which members of the organisation were engaged for the past several months. What is perhaps more problematic is that MC11 did not provide the organization its future work programme.