The agreements for the two largest areas of the WTO and the WTO, goods and services, have a three-part regime: many Uruguay Round agreements set timetables for future work. Part of this integrated program began almost immediately. In some areas, these were new or subsequent negotiations. In other areas, it included assessments or reviews of the situation at specific times. Some negotiations were concluded quickly, particularly in the areas of basic telecommunications and financial services. (Member State governments also quickly agreed on an agreement on the liberalization of trade in information technology products, an issue that does not fall under the integrated agenda.) The Doha Development Round was the next trade round, which began in 2001 and is still unresolved after missing its official 2005 deadline. [3] The GATT still exists as the WTO Framework Agreement for Trade in Goods, updated following the Uruguay Round negotiations (a distinction is made between the GATT 1994, the updated parts of the GATT, and the GATT 1947, the original agreement which is still at the heart of the GATT 1994). [10] However, GATT 1994 is not the only legally binding agreement contained in the Final Act; a long list of about 60 agreements, annexes, decisions and arrangements was adopted. In fact, the agreements can be divided into a simple structure with six main parts: one of the achievements of the Uruguay Round would be the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture, administered by the WTO, which more fully integrates agricultural trade into the GATT.
Prior to the Uruguay Round, agricultural trade conditions deteriorated with the increasing use of subsidies, the accumulation of inventories, the fall in world market prices and the rise in support costs. [12] It provides for the conversion of quantitative restrictions into customs duties and a gradual reduction of customs duties. The agreement also establishes rules and disciplines for agricultural export subsidies, domestic subsidies and sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures through the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures Groups such as Oxfam have criticized the Uruguay Round for not paying enough attention to the special needs of developing countries. One aspect of this criticism is that figures very close to the industries of rich countries – such as former Cargill director Dan Amstutz – played an important role in shaping the wording of the Uruguay Round with regard to agriculture and other issues. As with the WTO in general, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Health Gap and Global Trade Watch criticize what was negotiated in the Intellectual Property and Industrial Tariffs Round as too much restrictions on policy-making and human needs. One article states that the lack of experience of developing countries in WTO negotiations and the lack of knowledge on how developing countries would be affected by what developed countries want in the new areas of the WTO; the intensification of the mercantilist attitude of the great power of the GATT/WTO, the United States; The structure of the WTO, which has rendered ineffective the GATT tradition of consensus decision-making so that a country does not maintain the status quo, have been the reasons for this imbalance. [13] Australia`s new investment agreement with Hong Kong, signed in March 2019, includes a specific article on “investment and environmental, health and other regulatory objectives”. The Parties are not precluded from “taking measures that are otherwise consistent with this Agreement” to ensure that investments are “sensitive” to certain public policy objectives.
It contains exceptional articles similar to the Australia-Uruguay BIT. The 1986 Ministerial Declaration identified problems, including structural gaps and spillovers from the global trade policies of some countries, that the GATT was unable to address. To address these problems, the Eighth Gatt Round (known as the Uruguay Round) was launched in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in September 1986. [5] This was the largest negotiating mandate for trade ever agreed: the negotiations aimed to extend the trading system to several new areas, in particular trade in services and intellectual property, and to reform trade in the sensitive sectors of agriculture and textiles; all original GATT articles could be examined. [2] Despite the poor political outlook, much of the technical work that led to the first draft of a final legal agreement continued. This draft Final Act was prepared by the then Director-General of GATT, Arthur Dunkel, who led the negotiations at official level. It was put on the table in Geneva in December 1991. The text fulfilled all parts of the Punta del Este mandate, with one exception, it did not contain lists of participating countries that had made commitments to reduce import duties and open up their services markets. The project became the basis of the final agreement. They also wanted to draft code to deal with copyright infringement and other forms of intellectual property rights. The position of developing countries (GATT) was described in detail in the book Brazil in the URUGUAY Round of GATT: The development of Brazil`s position in the Uruguay Round, with a focus on the issue of services. This book describes the controversies over the issue of services as well as the resistance of developing countries to the so-called “new issues”.
[9] The WTO replaced the GATT as an international organization, but the General Agreement still exists as the WTO`s SUBSTANTIVE TREATY for trade in goods, updated following the Uruguay Round negotiations. Trade lawyers distinguish between gatt 1994, the updated gatt parts, and GATT 1947, the original agreement that is still at the heart of GATT 1994. Confusing? For most of us, it is enough to simply refer to GATT. Despite the difficulty, ministers agreed on a set of measures with initial results at the Montreal meeting. These included certain concessions on market access for tropical products in support of developing countries, as well as a simplified dispute settlement system and the Trade Policy Review Mechanism, which provided for the first comprehensive, systematic and regular reviews of the national trade policies and practices of GATT members. The round was to end when ministers met again in Brussels in December 1990. However, they did not agree on how agricultural trade should be reformed and decided to extend the talks. The Uruguay Round has entered its darkest phase. The round was due to end in December 1990, but the US and the EU did not agree on how to reform agricultural trade and decided to extend the negotiations. [6] Finally, in November 1992, the US and the EU settled most of their differences in an agreement informally known as the “Blair House Agreement” and on 15 November 1992. In April 1994, the agreement was signed by ministers from most of the 123 participating governments at a meeting in Marrakech, Morocco. [7] The Agreement created the World Trade Organisation, which entered into force on 1 January 1995 and was intended to replace the GATT system.
[2] It is widely regarded as the most profound institutional reform of the world trading system since the creation of the GATT. [8] It took seven and a half years, almost twice as long as it was originally. In the end, 123 countries participated. It covered almost every exchange, from toothbrushes to pleasure boats, from banks to telecommunications, from wild rice genes to AIDS treatments. It was simply the greatest trade negotiation of all time and most likely the largest negotiation of any kind in history. There were some advantages to delay. It has allowed some negotiations to go further than would have been possible in 1990: for example, certain aspects of services and intellectual property and the creation of the WTO itself. But the task had been immense and the fatigue of the negotiations was felt in trade bureaucracies around the world.
The difficulty of reaching agreement on a comprehensive package that encompasses almost the full range of current trade issues has led some to conclude that negotiations of this magnitude would never again be possible. However, the Uruguay Round agreements contain timetables for further negotiations on a number of issues. And in 1996, some countries openly called for a new round at the beginning of the next century. The response has been mixed; but the Marrakesh Agreement already contained commitments to resume negotiations on agriculture and services at the turn of the century. These began in early 2000 and were included in the Doha Development Agenda at the end of 2001 […].
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