Roberto Azevedo to be head of WTO

May 15, 2013

Roberto Azevedo of Brazil has been nominated as the head of the WTO (World Trade Organization) based at Geneva at a time when there seems an impasse over talks b/w developed and developing nations on freeing global commerce and to help develop poorer nations.Azevedo will take the charge from Pascal Lamy.
His nomination has been welcomed by India and many other developing countries who believe that as an insider, he will be able to shape a consensus b/w conflicting members before the 9th ministerial conference in Bali, seen as key to the future of the multilateral trade talk started in 2001 in Doha.
Azevedo believes that developing nations must secure a share of international trade commensurate with their needs, as enshrined in the preamble of the Marrakesh Agreement that was signed in 1994 which resulted into setting up of WTO.
What was Marrakesh Agreement?
The Marrakech Agreement was an agreement inked in Marrakech, Morocco, on 15th April 1994, establishing the World Trade Organization, which officially came into being on January 1, 1995.
The agreement developed out of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), supplemented by a number of other agreements on issues including trade in services, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, trade-related aspects of intellectual property and technical barriers to trade. It also established a new, more efficient and legally binding means of dispute resolution. The various pacts which make up the Marrakech Agreement combine as an indivisible whole; no entity can be party to any one agreement without being party to them all.