BALI: The 9th Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is set to open from Tuesday to Thursday, aiming to push forward the long-stalled Doha Round talks by sealing a trade package that covers several key elements of the decade-long talk.
The 9th WTO Ministerial Conference is seen as a great opportunity to revive the 12-year-old negotiation and break the stalemate by signing a less ambitious deal that covers mainly trade facilitation, development and agriculture.
If successful, the Bali package would pave way for finalizing other parts of the Doha Round in future negotiations.
The Doha Round of trade talks was launched by the World Trade Organization (WTO) at its ministerial conference held in Qatar in 2001, with an aim to help poor nations hurdle barriers in global trade and prosper through the free flow of goods.
Main areas of the Doha Round negotiation are agriculture, non- agricultural market access, services, intellectual property, trade and development, trade and environment, trade facilitation, WTO rules, and dispute settlement understanding.
Initially called the Doha Development Agenda, the Doha Round is the successor of the 1986-1994 Uruguay Round of multilateral trade talks. Agriculture and services are "built-in" agenda as trade barriers in these two sectors are considered particularly hard to eliminate.
The initial plan was to wrap up the Doha Round in 2005 but failure to reach a deal pushed back the schedule.
Over the past years, new deadlines were set and missed.
In July, 2008, the Doha Round came to a stall after nine days of intensive negotiation in Geneva over wide disparity in opinions on farm subsidies, tariffs, and non-agricultural market access between developed countries and developing ones.
Since then, though trade talks have been resumed in 2009 in face of the global financial crisis, little progress has been made at the WTO negotiation table. (QNA)
