World Trade OrganizationThe World Trade Organization (WTO) is an international organization designed to supervise and liberalize international trade. The WTO was created on January 1, 1995 and is the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was created in 1947 and continued to operate for almost fifty years as a de facto international organization. The Trade Organization deals with the rules of trade between nations on a near-global level; is responsible for negotiating and implementing new trade agreements, and is charged with overseeing member countries' adherence to all WTO agreements, which are signed by most of the world's trading nations and ratified in their parliaments. Most of the WTO's current work stems from the 1986-94 negotiations called the Uruguay Round and earlier negotiations under the GATT. The organization is currently the seat of new negotiations, under the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) launched in 2001. The WTO is governed by a Ministerial Conference, which meets every two years; a General Council, which implements the conference's political decisions and is responsible for day-to-day administration; and a director general, appointed by the Ministerial Conference. The headquarters of the WTO is in Geneva, Switzerland. The WTO's predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), was established after World War II in the wake of other new multilateral institutions dedicated to international economic cooperation – notably the now-known Bretton Woods institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Although no trade agreement was negotiated at Bretton Woods, the Conference recognized the need for new comparative legislation, supported by commitments to substantially strengthen development assistance. villages. The talks were very contentious and no agreement was reached, despite intense negotiations at the Fifth Ministerial Conference in Cancún in 2003 and at the Sixth Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong from 13 to 18 December 2005. On 24 July 2006, at the end of the yet another useless meeting of trade ministers in Geneva, Pascal Lamy, director general of the WTO, formally suspended the negotiations. However, in his report to the WTO General Council on 7 February 2007, Lamy stated that "political conditions are now more favorable for concluding the Round than they have been for a long time". He added that "political leaders around the world clearly want us to return fully to business, although we also need their continued commitment"".