(Not yet; 09-03; p.3)

Topics can be summarised as follows:

• Export subsidies
are paid by industrialised countries on agrarian products - e.g. on cotton or grain. Subsequently, producers in industrialised countries, although their costs are much higher, can offer their produce even cheaper on the world markets than producers in developing countries. Thus, generating income by trade becomes impossible for developing countries, their further sinking into poverty is even fostered.

• Market barriers
are established by both, developing and industrialised countries and as well in the non-agrarian sector. The motivation lies always in protecting one's "own" industries from competition and so from a slump in sales, the chosen means in a respectively advantageous structure of import taxes (among other procedures like hinting on lack of security standards and so on).

• Intellectual property rights
are quite new in their interpretation and are mostly requested by industrialised countries. For one part that is a dispute solely between them, concerning e.g. copyrights in the science and media business. To a growing extent however, it becomes a matter between industrialised and developing countries as well: think e.g. on patents on medicines to contain epidemics like AIDS in southern Africa.

• Trade in services
is problematic mostly for industrialised countries, because companies in the service sector can choose to register in that state that offers the lowest tax rates, provided that profits may be transferred freely. To give just one example of the multitude of services: the so-called "offshore-banking" means to register banking companies on some far-out islands that levy relatively low taxes.

The ministers of the member states could not reach any common agreement, so the conference ended without results. (read on here)