In 2002, “trade for development” was a core topic of the Millennium Development Goals. Fifteen years later, trade is at the periphery of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Three main reasons explain this rapid decline. First, trade negotiators did their best to obscure the Doha Round and bilateral trade negotiations in byzantine and sterile debates. Second, business stopped to pay attention to trade policy because firms turned to a form of liberalization tailor-made for their own global value chains: they traded tariff cuts of interest to them in exchange of investments in the opening countries.