The much-anticipated 14th Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization in Yaounde, Cameroon, has come and gone.

While some narrow outcomes were achieved, the conference failed to deliver on its most urgent goal: a comprehensive package of reform measures that would help strengthen the WTO's effectiveness.

Members were unable to even agree on extending the long-standing e-commerce moratorium which barred duties on electronic transmissions.

While the WTO continues to play a useful role in "less glamorous" issues such as technical cooperation, capacity building and trade policy reviews, the organization faces significant challenges in fulfilling its mandate to further multilateral trade liberalization, provide timely updates to the trade rule book, and serve as an effective enforcer of mutually agreed rules.

Despite the shortcomings of the WTO, most of its members continue to believe in the transformational benefits of trade and would like to see a further reduction in barriers and deeper, enforceable trade rules. The focus for realizing these ambitions, however, is shifting from global initiatives in Geneva toward regional and multilateral agreements.

The Asia-Pacific region has launched two of the largest and most consequential multilateral trade agreements in the world — the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership — which puts it at the forefront of this shift.

While these two agreements have partially overlapping memberships and similar overarching objectives — reduced restrictions and high-quality rules — there are important differences.

RCEP represents a more inclusive and incremental approach to meeting standards among a diverse group of economies, while CPTPP features a more focused membership.

Attempting to comprehensively "knit together" these two accords would therefore not be practical, at least for the time being. But meaningful benefit could be derived from promoting greater coordination and reducing unnecessary differences between them.

The objective should be to facilitate practical cooperation in areas where different rules, standards, and protocols may create inefficiencies. The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum is uniquely and ideally suited to provide the platform for such efforts.

Established in 1989, APEC is a regional economic forum consisting of 21 member economies from the Asia-Pacific region, committed to promoting trade and shared prosperity. Importantly, APEC is not a negotiating forum and does not set and enforce binding rules. It is more about policy coordination, norm setting, and sharing best practices. This creates a cooperative and constructive atmosphere among its member economies that is in short supply in other institutions. Given the current complex challenges in the global trade system and the wildly divergent views and priorities, this convergence is a source of strength and relevance for APEC.

APEC is well placed to identify and advance practical opportunities for alignment, or at least greater coordination, between the CPTPP and the RCEP.

Some of these areas include supply chain resilience, rules of origin, digital trade facilitation, paperless trade and single-window interoperability, and green trade.

Indeed, in most of these areas, APEC already has robust work plans underway.

There are a variety of ways further progress could be achieved. The initiation and expansion of regulatory interoperability pilot programs would almost certainly yield fruit, particularly on digital trade. Capacity building is a glaring need for the micro, small and medium-sized enterprises that predominate in the region.

Signing ambitious trade agreements is of limited value if companies lack the capacity to actually take advantage of them and APEC has a track record of success here.

The forum could also tap into one of its strongest comparative advantages: its role as a convener nonpareil.

Useful work could be done on mapping rules and identifying low-cost alignment opportunities between the CPTPP and the RCEP.

In years past, APEC has already done a lot of good work in analyzing market access overlaps and tariff schedules as part of its long-term goal of the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific concept.

Further efforts here could make important contributions to clearing out the unnecessary "underbrush" which sometimes makes trade more complex and costly.

To be sure, none of these efforts will change the world overnight. Do not expect fast or flashy progress on any of these issues. That is not the way APEC operates.

But by moving deliberately, thoughtfully, and at a pace its member economies can absorb, the progress APEC achieves is usually durable and meaningful.

While much is uncertain in today's chaotic trade environment, APEC's steady commitment to the principles of open trade, along with the cooperative working environment its governance model engenders, means that the forum is well positioned to play a lead role in ensuring that the benefits of trade are accessible throughout the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.

All eyes will be on Shenzhen, China, in November, as APEC leaders gather to cap off what could be a highly consequential year in the forum's history.

The author is a senior visiting fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

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