As of June 2012[update], the future of the Doha Round remained uncertain: the work programme lists 21 issues for which the original deadline of 1 January 2005 has not been met and the Work Cycle remains incomplete. [47] The conflict between free trade in industrial goods and services, but the maintenance of protectionism in agricultural subsidies to domestic agricultural sectors (required by developed countries) and the establishment of fair trade in agricultural products (demanded by developing countries) remain the main obstacles. This impasse has made it impossible to open new WTO negotiations beyond the Doha Development Round. As a result, there is an increasing number of bilateral free trade agreements between governments. [48] As of July 2012[update], there were several negotiating groups in the WTO system for agricultural trade negotiations currently at a standstill. [49] The General Council, chaired from 2020 by David Walker of New Zealand[63], has the following subsidiary bodies that oversee committees in various areas: seven rounds of negotiations have taken place under the GATT (1949-1979). The first real GATT trade cycles (1947 to 1960) focused on further tariff reductions. Then, in the mid-sixties, the Kennedy Round produced a GATT anti-dumping agreement and a section on development. The Tokyo Round of the seventies was the first major attempt to tackle trade barriers that do not exist in the form of tariffs and to improve the system by adopting a series of agreements on non-tariff barriers, in which, in some cases, existing GATT rules were interpreted and, in other cases, completely new paths have been taken. Since not all GATT members accepted these plurilateral agreements, they were often informally referred to as “codes”. (In the Uruguay Round, several of these codes were amended and converted into...
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