6.
Organization (WTO) is an organization that intends to supervise and liberalize international trade. The organization officially commenced on 1 January 1995 under the Marrakech Agreement, replacing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which commenced in 1948 * Role: The organization deals with regulation of trade between participating countries; it provides a framework for negotiating and formalizing trade agreements, and a dispute resolution process aimed at enforcing participants' adherence to WTO agreements, which are signed by representatives of member governments and ratified by their parliaments * The GATT was the only multilateral instrument governing international trade from 1946 until the WTO was established on 1 January 1995. GATT continued to operate for almost half a century as a semi-institutionalized multilateral treaty regime on a provisional basis
Ministerial conferences: * The highest decision-making body of the WTO is the Ministerial Conference, which usually meets every two years. It brings together all members of the WTO, all of which are countries or customs unions. * The inaugural ministerial conference was held in Singapore in 1996 * The second ministerial conference was held in Geneva in Switzerland. * The third conference in Seattle, Washington ended in failure, with massive demonstrations and police and National Guard crowd control efforts drawing worldwide attention. * The fourth ministerial conference was held in Doha in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar. * The sixth WTO ministerial conference was held in Hong Kong from 13–18 December 2005
Issues:
* In 2006. In this meeting, countries agreed to phase out all their agricultural export subsidies by the end of 2013, and terminate any cotton export subsidies by the end of 2006. Further concessions to developing countries included an