After nearly eight years of negotiation under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, ministers gathered in Marrakesh to sign an accord creating a permanent institution to police global trade rules, resolve disputes, and slash tariffs worldwide. The WTO formally began operations on January 1, 1995, replacing the more ad hoc GATT framework that had governed trade since 1947.
The Marrakesh Agreement was the product of the longest and most complex trade negotiation in history, the Uruguay Round, which dragged from 1986 to 1993 as negotiators fought over agriculture subsidies, intellectual property, and services trade that GATT had never adequately covered.
Unlike GATT, a provisional agreement that technically never received full legislative ratification in the United States, the WTO was built from the start as a formal international organization with binding dispute-resolution power, able to authorize trade sanctions against member states that violated its rules.
Critics on the left decried it almost immediately as a vehicle for corporate globalization that would gut labor and environmental protections, a critique that exploded into street protests at the WTO's 1999 Seattle ministerial. Supporters credited the organization's rules-based system with helping lift hundreds of millions out of poverty as global trade volumes surged in the following decades.