We hold our negotiations on joining the Word Trade Organisation in four major areas: bringing our national legislation in line with the WTO multilateral treaties, access to goods market, access to service market, state support of agriculture.

The issues of how our legislation corresponds with the WTO regulations are considered by the working group of the WTO dealing with our accession to the World Trade Organisation.

The working group on Belarus is chaired by Ms.Mia Horn Af Rantzien, Sweden, and is composed of 39 countries.

So far, there were seven meetings of the working group, with the last one held in 2005.

In 2009, Belarus together with Kazakhstan and Russia decided to accede to the WTO jointly, i.e. by way of the customs union among the three states. To that end, we set up a uniform delegation to negotiate with the WTO on behalf of the three countries.

During negotiations on the access to goods market, we adjust the maximum customs tariffs for items coming in after we join the WTO.

So far, we held 28 bilateral negotiations with countries of the working group that ended up in sealing the outcome protocols with 10 WTO Member countries: Armenia, Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Dominican Republic, India, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Panama, Turkey. Besides, Belarus and China signed a memorandum of understanding which envisages mutual recognition of a market economy status. We came closer with other countries on our future commitments on ensuring access to goods and services markets. We also managed to narrow the list of demands by a number of the WTO member countries that were unacceptable for us.

Our negotiations on agriculture support now reached the stage where we specify the amount of subsidiaries within concrete state programmes.