WTO and Ethical Trade
WTO and the Seattle Ministerial Meeting
Introduction to WTOThe WTO was created in 1995 as part of the Uruguay Round of negotiations on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) which sets out the rules for world trade. Whilst GATT administered multilateral trading agreements, it was never a legal international organisation. The WTO is a permanent institution founded upon the principle of free trade and agreements between notionally equal trading parties and GATT is its main set of rules.
The official introduction to the WTO can be found at.... World trade negotiations take place during series of meetings known as 'Rounds'. The last one was the Uruguay Round that was launched in 1986 and finally agreed in 1994. Since then there have been international meetings of trade ministers meetings to discuss implementation of the Uruguay Round agreement and to make new proposals, for example the Ministerial meeting in Singapore in December 1996. Seattle MinisterialThe next Ministerial meeting will be in Seattle and 30 November to 3 December 1999. The Seattle meeting is essentially a meeting of World Trade Ministers, but many other stakeholders will be present in fringe meetings, from environmental groups to international development ministries to indigenous people's groups. There will be a day set aside before the meeting for environment and people's groups to present their views to the assembled ministers. The AgendaThe purpose of the Ministerial Meeting at Seattle is to agree the terms of reference for the next Round of negotiations on World Trade. There is an in-built agenda following on from previous Rounds, such as further liberalisation in agriculture, review of liberalisation in services and a review of the TRIPs agreement (Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights). Some Member governments want to include further items of relevance to the forest sector, including: Back to introduction Back to NRET homepage |