The Uruguay Round was the 8th round of multilateral trade negotiations (MTN) conducted within the framework of the General 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 the World Trade Organization, with GATT 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 (agriculture, textiles) and increasingly important new areas previously not included (trade in services, intellectual property, investment policy trade distortions).^[1] 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).^[2]

The Doha Development Round was the next trade round, beginning in 2001 and still unresolved after missing its official deadline of 2005.^[3]

Goals

The main objectives of the Uruguay Round were:

• to reduce agricultural subsidies
• to lift restrictions on foreign investment
• to begin the process of opening trade in services like banking and insurance.
• to include the protection of intellectual property

They also wanted to draft a code to deal with copyright violation and other forms of intellectual property rights.

History

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.^[4] As described below, the round was launched in Punta del Este, Uruguay in September 1986,^[5][6] followed by negotiations in Geneva, Brussels, Washington, D.C., and Tokyo.

Achievements

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).^[12] 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:

• an umbrella agreement (the Agreement Establishing the WTO);
• goods and investment (the Multilateral Agreements on Trade in Goods including the GATT 1994 and the Trade Related Investment Measures (TRIMS));
• services (General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS));
• intellectual property (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS));
• dispute settlement (DSU);
• reviews of governments' trade policies (TPRM).^[13]

The agreements for the two largest areas under the WTO, goods and services, share a three-part outline:

• broad principles (such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and General Agreement on Trade in Services);
• extra agreements and annexes;
• lengthy schedules (lists) of commitments made by individual countries.^[2]

One of the achievements of the Uruguay round would be the Uruguay 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.^[14] 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 the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures

Criticism

Groups such as Oxfam have criticized the Uruguay Round for paying insufficient attention to the needs of developing countries. One aspect of this criticism is that figures very close to rich country industries—such as former Cargill executive Dan Amstutz—had a major role in the drafting of Uruguay Round language on agriculture and other matters. As with the WTO in general, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Health Gap and Global Trade Watch also criticize what was negotiated in the Round on intellectual property and industrial tariffs 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.^[15]

See also

• Cairns Group - interest group composed of 19 agricultural exporting nations, including Uruguay
• Cultural exception - political concept arguing that culture is to be treated differently than commercial products
• Doha Development Round - ongoing trade negotiation round; commenced in 2001
• Golan v. Holder, a challenge to the copyright restoration provisions of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, the implementation of the Uruguay Round agreements in the United States Code. The Act was upheld.
• Tokyo Round - trade negotiation round that aimed to control non-tariff barriers and voluntary export restrictions; 1973–79

References

External links

• WTO history of the Uruguay Round
• WTO Final Act of the Uruguay Round
• Peter Gallagher (15 December 2005). The First Ten Years of the WTO: 1995-2005. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-86215-8.