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Negotiating process / history

The Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) is the result of a decade-long process that started in 1996.


It started at the WTO Ministerial Conference in Singapore in 1996, where a mixed group of WTO Members (*1) put the issue on the agenda of the WTO. In the Singapore Ministerial Declaration, Members asked “(…) the Council for Trade in Goods to undertake exploratory and analytical work (…) on the simplification of trade procedures in order to assess the scope for WTO rules in this area (*2)”. The text of the Agreement was adopted at the Bali Ministerial Conference in 2013, where Members also agreed on the procedure to integrate the future TFA into the WTO Agreement. Eleven months later the WTO General Council adopted the Protocol for Amending the WTO Agreement, and this Protocol has since been open for acceptance by WTO Members.

The negotiations of the Agreement were unusual in several ways, namely the bottom-up process by which Members put forward first conceptual proposals, and later legal text for the new rules. This novel way of conducting the negotiations sets a precedent for future trade agreements at the WTO. A WTO Secretariat insider’s view states, “it [likely] will serve as a benchmark for other negotiating exercises. It will be difficult, for instance, to define Special and Differential Treatment (S&DT) in future WTO agreements without at least considering the TFA model. The inclusive, de–centralized way of conducting the talks is also likely to set new standards in the trade negotiating business (*3)”.

Defining the scope of the negotiations

From 1996 to 2001, WTO Members led discussions in the Council of Trade in Goods (CTG) to establish the need and scope for WTO rules on trade facilitation. This work was important for many reasons:

  • First, Members concluded that it was necessary to establish a new regulatory framework. Although the General Agreement on Trade in Goods (GATT) does contain aspects of trade facilitation, most of the provisions were considered too general to be of operational use.
  • Second, Members defined the scope of trade facilitation at the WTO. The focus was the simplification of import and export procedures, document and data requirements, transparency, and cooperation among customs and other government agencies. Other issues, such as the availability of transport and banking services, and payment and financial flows, were excluded from the scope as they relate to other Agreements or for later inclusion.

Based on the preparatory work of the CTG, WTO Members agreed at the Ministerial Conference in Doha in 2001 to start negotiations on a new legal framework for trade facilitation at the WTO. The scope of the negotiations was the review and clarification of three GATT Articles (Article V: Freedom of Transit; Article VIII: Fees and Formalities connected with Importation and Exportation; Article X: Publication and Administration of Trade Regulations)(*4).

Although Members adopted the Doha Ministerial Declaration at the Ministerial Conference in 2001, negotiations on trade facilitation did not start before the second half of 2004. In fact, WTO Members were not able to agree on the work programme and modalities, and developing countries were opposed to starting negotiations on the new issues, including trade facilitation. The resistance to trade facilitation was eventually dropped and the negotiations were launched, with the so-called July Package, in the General Council (GC) decision of 2 August 2004 (*5).

Annex D

The Annex D of this GC decision contains the modalities for the negotiations on trade facilitation and is referenced in the Preamble of the Trade Facilitation Agreement. The Annex D defined the objectives of the negotiations as follows:

  • to clarify and improve the relevant aspects of the GATT Article V, GATT Article VIII, and GATT Article X with a view to further expediting the movement, release and clearance of goods,
  • to draft provisions for effective cooperation between Customs and other agencies on trade facilitation and Customs compliance issues, and
  • to enhance technical assistance and capacity building in this area.

Following 2004, a Negotiating Group on Trade Facilitation (NGTF) was set up and negotiations advanced slowly on the basis of Members’ proposals. In December 2009, the first draft of the consolidated negotiating text was compiled from these proposals and Members continued revising this text until the very last moment at the Bali Ministerial Conference.

In total 19 revisions of the negotiating text were necessary to reach consensus amongst all the Members. Whilst the negotiating process remained an inclusive and bottom-up process, several facilitator- led groups carried out parallel negotiations to advance consensus. Late in 2013, when only a few issues remained unresolved, the WTO Director General appointed four Ambassadors as Friends of the Chair, and led himself bilateral discussions between the main opponents of the text. Nevertheless, the final 70 brackets were only removed at the Bali Ministerial Conference itself (*6).

(*1) The group of WTO members that supported multilateral rules on trade facilitation later became known as the Colorado Group. They included WTO members such as Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, EEC (later EC), Hong Kong China, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Morocco, New Zealand, Norway, Paraguay, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United States. Note that groups are informal groupings of WTO members and their membership composition can evolve at any time.
(*2) World Trade Organization, Singapore Ministerial Declaration, 18 December 1996, WT/MIN(96)/DEC
(*3) Nora Neufeld, 2014. ” THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD: HOW WTO MEMBERS FINALLY REACHED A TRADE FACILITATION AGREEMENT”, WTO Staff Working Papers ERSD-2014-6, World Trade Organization (WTO), Economic Research and Statistics Division; and Nora Neufeld, 2016. “Implementing the Trade Facilitation Agreement: From Vision to Reality”, WTO Staff Working papers ERSD-2016-14-World Trade Organization (WTO), Economic Research and Statistics Division.
(*4) § 27 of World Trade Organization Ministerial Declaration, 20 November 2001, WT/MIN(01)7DEC/1
(*5) World Trade Organization, Doha Work Programme. Decision adopted by the General Council on 1 August 2004, 2 August 2004 (WT/L/579).
(*6) For more details on this phase consult Nora Neufeld, 2014. ” THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD: HOW WTO MEMBERS FINALLY REACHED A TRADE FACILITATION AGREEMENT”, page 10, WTO Staff Working Papers ERSD-2014-6, World Trade Organization (WTO), Economic Research and Statistics Division.

WTO Agreement on TF