Afghanistan to Join WTO at Nairobi Ministerial

Afghanistan has now cleared one of the final hurdles for WTO membership, with officials confirming last week that negotiations in the Working Party tasked with that process are now completed.

The expected entry of Afghanistan to the global trade club marks the ninth least developed country (LDC) to be invited to join the organisation since it was founded in 1995. The talks have been underway for over a decade, with Kabul tabling its request to join the WTO in November 2004.

Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, the President of Afghanistan, similarly welcomed the news, saying that WTO membership could pave the way for the country’s transition into “an effective and functioning market economy that attracts investment, creates jobs and improves the welfare of the people.”

Along with negotiating with WTO members at the multilateral level in the Working Party process, any country interested in joining the global trade club must also hold bilateral negotiations with any interested current member, with those concessions then extended to the entire WTO. Afghanistan concluded the last of those bilateral talks in February 2014.

Acceding LDCs: Afghanistan’s Working Party Chairperson, Roderick van Schreven of the Netherlands, remarked last week that the “conclusion of this least developed country’s accession is a critical win-win for LDCs and the WTO,” as Afghanistan will be the second LDC to receive approval from the organisation’s membership this year, following the approval of Liberia’s accession package in October.

Six more LDCs, namely Bhutan, Comoros, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Sao Tomé and Principe, and Sudan, are all negotiating to accede to the organisation, though those processes saw limited to no movement last year, according to the WTO Annual Accession Report for 2014.

To date, 34 of the 48 countries classified by the UN as least developed countries are members of the global trade body, with Afghanistan and Liberia set to bring that number up to 36.