WTO - The World Trade Organization!

I thought long and hard about introducing this topic to my audience. Its a very important framework as part of a multilateral trading framework but my personal opinion is that the WTO is strongly tilted in favor of developed countries such as the USA, Europe etc. and not so much in favor of developing countries (such as India) which is why almost all talks and negotiations fail to reach a settlement of sorts.

You can read more about the WTO’s website (with tons of material available on it or you can ask me, I have tons more of written material from my MIB coursework to provide on the same).

WTO - http://www.wto.org

Farm sector is still important as once upon a time (before the Hindu growth rate), the bulk of India’s GDP were from the Agricultural sector. We do have an Agreement on Agriculture and one of my prof’s from IIFT, Dr. Vijaya Katti, has done extensive research on AoA. The US also regards its farm sector and provides a lot of subsidies for its farm exports that in turn, do not allow other developing countries to compete on an equal trading platform.

There are other Agreements on IP covered under the WTO framework (TRIPS) - Trade related intellectual property rights that is covered mainly on the three major IP’s - Patents, trademarks, copyrights. IP is still in its infancy stages in India but is catching up as I read in the newspaper today that Bangalore city alone has applied for over 5000 patents in the last year.

Thankfully, people are beginning to realize that Intellectual assets are equally (if not more) important when compared to physical assets!

But think about this - someone in the US has patented the Indian origin Basmati rice. Some German has patented the Gaythri Mantra (sacred to the Hindu community and to me)!

AoA, TRIPS are only two of the multitude of the agreements under the WTO. We will speak more about them in the forthcoming posts.