New Delhi, April 2 -- Like the ministerial gatherings in 1999, 2003 and 2017, the 14th Ministerial of the World Trade Organization (WTO), held at Yaounde, Cameroon, ended without an agreement on anything. US trade representative Jamieson Greer used the occasion to reiterate his long-held view that the WTO is not of much use.

This trade body operates by consensus and India has had its fair share of blame for such huddles yielding little, having held firm on its right to subsidize agriculture, a point that rich countries found hard to stomach.

This time, the big tussle was over the extension of a moratorium on digital commerce tariffs, with the US and Brazil as the principal adversaries. A plurilateral pact is in the works to keep digital...