Gatt Agreement Wikipedia

9. April 2021

The Uruguay Round Agricultural Agreement remains the most important agreement in the history of trade negotiations for the liberalisation of agricultural trade. The aim of the agreement was to improve market access for agricultural products, reduce national aid to agriculture in the form of price-distorting subsidies and quotas, eliminate agricultural export subsidies over time and harmonize health and plant health measures among Member States as much as possible. The WTO regulates trade in goods, services and intellectual property among participating countries, imposing a framework for negotiating trade agreements and a dispute settlement mechanism to enforce WTO agreements signed by representatives of member governments[8]:fol.9-10 and ratified by their parliaments. [9] The WTO prohibits discrimination between trading partners, but provides exceptions for environmental protection, national security and other important objectives. [10] Trade disputes are settled by independent WTO judges in dispute resolution proceedings. [10] The Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement is an agreement of international law between all World Trade Organization (WTO) member states. It sets minimum standards for the regulation of different forms of intellectual property by national governments, as is the case for nationals of other WTO member states. [3] The TRIPS agreement was negotiated at the end of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) between 1989 and 1990[4] and is managed by the WTO. Export subsidies are the third pillar. The 1995 agricultural agreement required industrialized countries to reduce export subsidies by at least 36% (in value terms) or by 21% (by volume) over a six-year value.

For developing countries, the agreement called for reductions of 24% (in value) and 14% (in volume) over ten years. The assertion that Article 24 could be used in this way has been criticized as unrealistic by Mark Carney, Liam Fox and others, as point 5c of the contract requires an agreement between the parties so that Article 5b can be useful, since there would be no agreement in the case of a non-agreement scenario. In addition, critics of the GATT 24 approach point out that services would not fall under such regulation. [28] [29] However, the dispute resolution system cannot be used to resolve trade disputes arising from political differences. When Qatar called for the creation of a body on the measures imposed by the United Arab Emirates, other GCC countries and the United States immediately rejected their request as a political issue and declared that national security issues were political and unsuitable for the WTO system. [87] The twenty agreements were signed in Marrakech in April 1994, the Marrakech agreement.