The president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, signed the letter ratifying the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Trade Facilitation Agreement at a reception ceremony for the organization’s Director-General, which was held at the Presidential Palace. The agreement was the result of negotiations carried out at the Ministerial Conference in Bali in December 2013, whose final text of the Protocol Amendment was approved by members in November 2014. The agreement establishes a series of rules intended to expedite and reduce bureaucracy within the traffic of goods and services, particularly in customs, reducing costs and facilitating the global chain of production and sales. The negotiation of the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement is in line with the conclusions reached by a report released in January 2013 by the World Economic Forum (prepared jointly with the World Bank), entitled Enabling Trade Valuing Growth Opportunities, which estimates that the worldwide reduction of barriers to supply chains would result in a 4.7 % increase of global GDP and 14.5 % of international trade. The Protocol Amendment will only come into force after it is ratified by two thirds of the members of the WTO (108 countries), and with no deadline concerning the internal approval process. To the present date, only 45 member States notified the WTO of having fulfilled all the formal steps for its domestic ratification (Brazil has not yet formally notified the entity).
2016/04/20
