WORLD TRADE ORGANISATION (WTO)

WTO on the web: http://www.wto.org

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is not part of the UN structure, although there are co-operating agreements and practices. The WTO, based in Geneva, is the only international institution that deals with the rules of trade between nations world-wide. Its overall aim is to make tradable goods and services flow as freely as possible between nations and markets - the complexity of which made the former Global Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) outdated and called for a new system that resulted in the foundation of the WTO.

The WTO's tasks cover handling disputes between member states, monitoring national trade policies, facilitating technical assistance for developing countries, furthering trade liberalisation negotiations and administering existing trade agreements. Decisions are usually taken by consensus among its about 140 member states and become legally-binding after ratification in national parliaments.

Critics often emphasise that the power of transnational corporations has risen through the WTO whose legally binding rules threaten to override all other sustainable development agreements, instruments, declarations or action plans. The WTO is often seen as a rich nation's club to promote their own interests and has systematically created a global governance system for many issues that are deeply relevant to sustainable development. If the WTO is to live up to its own objective to contribute to sustainable development, it must not focus on trade liberalisation as the prime and overall objective. Instead, it must develop international trade regulations into which social and ecological concerns are fully integrated as unconstrained global trade leads to further depletion of Earth's resources and buffering capacities.