Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 13 • Number 20 • 3rd June 2009
WTO Confirms Ministerial Meeting for 30 Nov – 2 Dec
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The WTO will hold its seventh ministerial conference at the organisation’s headquarters in Geneva later this year, the organisation’s General Council agreed last week. The summit will focus on the organisation’s regular work, not the Doha Round trade talks, WTO officials have stressed.
The theme of this year’s meeting will be “the WTO, the Multilateral Trading System and the Current Global Economic Environment.”
The announcement of the ministerial, which had been widely anticipated, came at last week’s meeting of the WTO’s General Council.
WTO rules call for a ministerial conference once every two years, but three and a half years have passed since the most recent such meeting was held in Hong Kong in December 2005. Other ministerials have been held in Cancun (2003), Doha (2001), Seattle (1999), Geneva (1998) and Singapore (1996).
But the next ministerial will have a different focus than past gatherings. Unlike previous summits, this year’s ministerial will centre on the WTO’s ‘regular work’, not the Doha Round trade negotiations, Lamy told delegates last month.
“We should de-dramatise ministerial meetings, make them a more regular exercise, where WTO activities are reviewed across the board,” the director-general said. “A regular ministerial meeting is one thing; ministerial involvement in negotiations is another. We should not confuse the two.”
ICTSD reporting.
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WTO really cannot go to the multilateral trading system. Before arriving its objective, why does it make become organization bigger and bigger? Wtih a lot of members, it will become more and more difficult to get consensus in the negotiations because of different needs of different economy. How to solve this problems?