India, April 28 -- With Donald Trump guillotining the multilateral trading order by first declaring differentiated tariffs on other countries and then announcing that the US will conduct bilateral negotiations to remove them, there are many who are mourning the demise of free trade in the world.

While what is happening today is far from ideal, free trade always had an Orwellian twist of being freer for richer countries. This inequality of opportunity in accessing export markets was achieved through myriad mechanisms other than tariffs which put a prohibitive economic burden on developing countries. These non-tariff barriers (NTBs) have taken multiple forms over the years; sometimes as sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures, sometimes ...