World Trade Organization

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The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an international organization which oversees a large number of agreements covering the "rules of trade" between its member states. It was created in 1995 as a secretariat to administer the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, a post-war trade treaty which laid much of the groundwork for the WTO. The WTO is the long-delayed successor to the project of the International Trade Organization, which was intended to follow GATT and whose charter was agreed at the UN Conference on Trade and Employment in Havana in March 1948, but which was blocked by the US Senate.

WTO headquarters are located in Geneva, Switzerland. Its current Director-General is Supachai Panitchpakdi. As of 13 October 2004, there are 148 members in the organization. All WTO members are required to grant one another most favored nation status.

In the late 1990s, the WTO became a major target for protests by the anti-globalization movement.

Contents

1 Decision-making structure

Decision-making structure

Where most international organizations operate on a one country, one vote or even a weighted voting basis, many WTO decisions, such as adopting agreements (and revisions to them) are determined by consensus. Voting is only employed as a fall-back mechanism or in special cases. Critics observe that the consensus governance model moves power away from developing countries towards powerful first-world states, who can veto proposals they object to and prevent formal dissent on most measures they support. However the most noteable recent failures of consensus, at the Ministerial meetings at Seattle (1999) and Cancún (2003), were due to the refusal of some developing countries to accept proposed decisions.

The advantage of consensus is that it encourages efforts to find the most widely acceptable decision. This does not necessarily mean that unanimity is ever found: only that no Member finds a decision so unacceptable that they must insist on their objection. The main disadvantage of consensus is that it can take a long time and many rounds of negotiation to develop a consensus decision and the final agreement may include ambiguous language on contentious points that makes future interpretation of the treaty difficult.

Unlike many other international organizations, the WTO has significant power to enforce its decisions, through the operation of its Dispute Settlement Body, an international trade court with the power to authorize sanctions against states which do not comply with its rulings.

History

January 1, 1995 - WTO came into existence, following the Marrakech Agreement.
May 1, 1995 - Renato Ruggiero became director-general for a 4-year term.
September 1, 1999 - Mike Moore became director-general. The post had been fiercely contested; eventually a compromise was reached with Mike Moore and Supachai Panitchpakdi taking half each of a six-year term.
November 30, 1999 - 3rd ministerial conference in Seattle, Washington, USA. The conference itself ended in failure, with massive demonstrations and riots drawing worldwide attention.
November 9 - November 13, 2001 - 4th ministerial conference in Doha, Qatar. Issuance of the Doha Declaration.
December 11, 2001 - The People's Republic of China joined the WTO after 15 years of negotiations (the longest in GATT history).
September 1, 2002 - Supachai Panitchpakdi became director-general.
September 10 - September 14, 2003 - 5th ministerial conference in Cancún, Mexico. An alliance of 22 southern states, led by India, China and Brazil, resisted demands from the North for agreements on the so-called "Singapore issues": investment protection, competition policy, transparency in government procurement and trade facilitation, while calling for an end to agricultural subsidies within the EU and the US. The talks broke down without progress.

Iran, which first asked to join the WTO in 1996, has seen its request repeatedly blocked by the United States, which lists Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism. Russia is also not yet a member, and first applied to join GATT in 1993.

External links

Official WTO homepage
- WTO | Understanding the WTO - members
Agreements administered by the WTO
International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development
Recent (9/3/2003) Guardian article on WTO - by George Monbiot
BBC News - Profile: WTO
BBC News - Timeline: WTO - A chronology of key events
[1] Jargon Explained, Glossaries of Trade terms compiled by 3D -> Trade - Human Rights - Equitable Economy.
The Nations’ Struggle for the Wealth of the World and its Latest Battlefields