The genetics of the Uruguay Round were dispersed in November 1982 at a procedural convention of GATT individuals in Geneva. Though the ministers meant to begin a major new conversation, the conference discontinued on farming and was excessively regarded as a shortage. In fact, the work agenda that the ministers agreed created the foundations for what was to become the Uruguay Round negotiating schedule. And so on, it took four more years of examination, demonstrating issues and persevering agreement-building, before secretaries agreed to launch the new tour. They did so in September 1986, in Punta del Este, Uruguay. They finally accepted a negotiating schedule that covered practically every prominent trade policy matter.

The negotiations were going to expand the commerce framework into several new regions, especially trade in goods and intellectual ownership, and to repair trade in the sensitive sections of farming and textiles. It was the major negotiating authorization on trade ever accepted, and the ministers afford themselves four years to finish it. Two years later, in December 1988, secretaries met another once in Montreal, Canada, for what was assumed to be an estimation of advance at the tour’s half-way period.

The purpose was to explanation the agenda for the residual two years, but the conversations stop in an solidity that was not determined until officials met more placidly in Geneva the following April. Despite the hardness, during the Montreal meeting , ministers accepted a bundle of early results. These included some privileges on market arrival for orbital products — strived at supporting developing countries — as well as an organized struggle adjustment system, and the Trade Policy Review Mechanism which gave for the first global, systematic and regular introductions of national trade policies and exercises of GATT members. The tour was supposed to end when ministers met once more in Brussels, in December 1990. But they contradict on how to regulate agricultural trade and confirmed to expand the talks. The Uruguay Round entered its bleakest period.

In spite of the poor political view, a major amount of technical job continued driving to the first outline of a final valid compact. This draft "Final Act" was constituted by the GATT director-general, Arthur Dunkel, who acted the talks at officials’ grade. It was put on the schedule in Geneva in December 1991. The version obtained every part of the Punta del Este authorization, with one exclusion— it did not include the contributing countries’ lists of obligations for cutting import tasks and opening their services markets. The rough copy became the foundation for the final contract.

Over the next two years, the talks weaved between relative failure to predictions of imminent victory. Various deadlines arrived and went. New points of main conflict arose to join farming: services, market entrance, anti-dumping rules, and the suggested creation of a new foundation. Differences between the United States and European Union became focal to hopes for a definitive and successful conclusion.

In November 1992, the US and EU stabilized most of their variations on cultivation in a deal recognized informally as the "Blair House accord". By July 1993 the US, EU, Japan and Canada proclaimed considerable progress in talks on tariffs and related topics. It took until 15 December 1993 for every problem to be lastly determined and for negotiations on market entrance for goods and services to be complemented (although some final contacts were completed in negotiations on market access a few weeks later). On 15 April 1994, the treaty was signed by viziers from most of the 123 participating offices at a meeting in Marrakesh, Morocco.

The retardation had some traits. It allowed some talks to advance further than would have been potential in 1990: for example some sides of services and intellectual property, and the induction of the WTO itself. But the duty had been massive and negotiation-tiredness was felt in trade officials around the world. The hardness of reaching contract on a complete package including almost the whole range of present trade problems led some to conclude that a talk on this scale would never again be likely.

Yet, the Uruguay Round contracts comprise timetables for new talks on a number of themes. And by 1996, some countries were openly inviting for a new tour early in the following century. The response was unsettled; but the Marrakesh contract did already contain obligations to reopen talks on farming and services at the transition of the century. These launched in early 2000 and were combined into the Doha Development Agenda in 2001.