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1 month agoUS trade chief lambasts WTO after failed talks
The WTO failed to extend the e-commerce customs duties moratorium, prompting the US to seek alternative trade agreements with other nations.
"We worked hard," WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said, adding that the US and Brazil in particular "need more time" to work out their differences over the agreement to impose levies on cross-border online orders.
In late November and early December 1999, the World Trade Organization convened in Seattle for a round of conferences and negotiations. Tens of thousands of protesters hit the streets to meet them, including labor activists alarmed by the post-NAFTA landscape of the US, as well as environmentalists dismayed at eroding standards of ecological care under the kinds of agreements the WTO was arranging. They in turn encountered a police response more vicious than many anticipated, particularly once the protests threatened to shut down the conference.
It's a significant statement from anyone, let alone Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director-general of the World Trade Organization. She warned at the Fortune Global Forum in Riyadh that the global economy is in its choppiest waters since the 1930s, no small feat considering that decade saw the Great Depression and the outbreak of the Second World War - and the Great Recession of 2008 is still in living memory.