| Uruguay Round | |
|---|---|
| Status | Complete |
| Genre | Trade Round |
| Begins | September 1986 |
| Ends | 15 April 1994 |
| Location(s) | Punta del Este,Montreal,Geneva,Brussels,Washington, D.C.,Tokyo,Marrakesh |
| Country | Uruguay,Canada,Switzerland,Belgium,United States,Japan,Morocco |
| Previous event | Tokyo Round |
| Next event | Doha Development Round |
| Participants | 105[1] |
TheUruguay Round was the 8th round ofmultilateral trade negotiations (MTN) conducted within the framework of theGeneral Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), spanning from 1986 to 1993 and embracing 123 countries as "contracting parties". The Round led to the creation of theWorld Trade Organization, withGATT remaining as an integral part of the WTO agreements. The broad mandate of the Round had been to extend GATT trade rules to areas previously exempted as too difficult to liberalize[clarification needed] (agriculture,textiles) and increasingly important new areas previously not included (trade inservices,intellectual property,investment policy trade distortions).[2] The Round came into effect in 1995 with deadlines ending in 2000 (2004 in the case of developing country contracting parties) under the administrative direction of the newly created World Trade Organization (WTO).[3]
TheDoha Development Round was the next trade round, beginning in 2001 and still unresolved after missing its official deadline of 2005.[4]
The main objectives of the Uruguay Round were:
They also wanted to draft a code to deal withcopyright violation and other forms ofintellectual property rights.
A set of updated documents was produced in Geneva by the office of the Director-General during July 1986 in order to prepare the way for progress to be made.[5] As described below, the round was launched inPunta del Este, Uruguay in September 1986,[6][7] followed by negotiations inGeneva,Brussels,Washington, D.C., andTokyo.
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The 1986 Ministerial Declaration identified problems including structural deficiencies,spill-over impacts of certain countries' policies on world trade GATT could not manage. To address these issues, the eighth GATT round (known as the Uruguay Round) was launched in September 1986, inPunta del Este,Uruguay.[8] It was the biggest negotiating mandate on trade ever agreed: the talks were going to extend the trading system into several new areas, notably trade in services and intellectual property, and to reform trade in the sensitive sectors of agriculture and textiles; all the original GATT articles were up for review.[3]
The round was supposed to end in December 1990, but the US andEU disagreed on how to reform agricultural trade and decided to extend the talks.[9] Finally, in November 1992, the US and EU settled most of their differences in a deal known informally as "the Blair House accord", and on 15 April 1994, the deal was signed by ministers from most of the 123 participating governments at a meeting inMarrakesh,Morocco.[10] The agreement established theWorld Trade Organization, which came into being upon its entry into force on 1 January 1995, to replace the GATT system.[3] It is widely regarded as the most profound institutional reform of the world trading system since the GATT's establishment.[11]
The position ofDeveloping Countries (GATT) was detailed in the book:Brazil in the Uruguay Round of the GATT: The Evolution of Brazil’s Position in the Uruguay Round, with Emphasis on the Issue of Services. In this book, the polemics about the issue of services are described, as well as the opposition of Developing Countries to the so called "New Issues".[12]
The 20 agreements were signed inMarrakesh—theMarrakesh Agreement—in April 1994.
The GATT still exists as the WTO's umbrella treaty for trade in goods, updated as a result of the Uruguay Round negotiations (a distinction is made between GATT 1994, the updated parts of GATT, and GATT 1947, the original agreement which is still the heart of GATT 1994).[13] The GATT 1994 is not, however, the only legally binding agreement included in the Final Act; a long list of about 60 agreements, annexes, decisions and understandings was adopted. In fact, the agreements fall into a simple structure with six main parts:
The agreements for the two largest areas under the WTO, goods and services, share a three-part outline:
One of the achievements of the Uruguay round would be theUruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture, administered by the WTO, which brings agricultural trade more fully under the GATT. Prior to the Uruguay Round, conditions for agricultural trade were deteriorating with increasing use of subsidies, build-up of stocks, declining world prices and escalating costs of support.[15] It provides for converting quantitative restrictions to tariffs and for a phased reduction of tariffs. The agreement also imposes rules and disciplines on agricultural export subsidies, domestic subsidies, and sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures through theAgreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures.
Groups such asOxfam have criticized the Uruguay Round for paying insufficient attention to the needs ofdeveloping countries. One aspect of this criticism is that figures very close to rich country industries—such as formerCargill executiveDan Amstutz—had a major role in the drafting of Uruguay Round language onagriculture and other matters. As with the WTO in general,non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Health Gap andGlobal Trade Watch also criticize what was negotiated in the Round onintellectual property and industrialtariffs as setting up too many constraints on policy-making and human needs. An article asserts that the developing countries’ lack of experience in WTO negotiations and lack of knowledge of how the developing economies would be affected by what the industrial countries wanted in the WTO new areas; the intensified mercantilist attitude of the GATT/WTO’s major power, the US; the structure of the WTO that made the GATT tradition of decision by consensus ineffective, so that a country would not preserve the status quo, were the reasons for this imbalance.[16]
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