There may well be an innate human tendency to think life will always go back to the way it was after a crisis.

The fact is, however, that global trade growth won’t naturally revert to pre-2008 levels when it was fueled by Chinese hypergrowth and the mushrooming of international supply chains, the combination of which pulled millions of people out of poverty.

In the uncharted economic territory in which we now find ourselves, we need to navigate in different ways with different instruments. To boost trade, we need to better explain and implement free trade agreements.

We should better support other fast-growing emerging markets, continue to close trade financing gaps, and embrace new technologies that can bring more players into global trade.

Last year, trade dropped by a whopping 13.5% versus 2014 in dollar value terms due to a collapse in commodity prices. The volume of trade transactions, though, increased at approximately 2.8%.