held in five working groups and in other existing bodies of the WTO. Selected topics under negotiation are discussed below in five groups: market access, development issues, WTO rules, trade facilitation and other issues. Before Doha Before the Doha ministerial, negotiations had already been under way on trade in agriculture and trade in services. These ongoing negotiations had been required under the last round of multilateral trade negotiations (the Uruguay Round, 1986–1994). However, some countries, including the United States, wanted to expand the agriculture and services talks to allow trade-offs and thus achieve greater trade liberalization. The first WTO ministerial conference, which was held in Singapore in 1996, established permanent working groups on four issues: transparency in government procurement, trade facilitation (customs issues), trade and investment, and trade and competition. These became known as the Singapore issues. These issues were pushed at successive ministerials by the European Union, Japan and Korea, and opposed by most developing countries. Since no agreement was reached, the developed nations pushed that any new trade negotiations must include the mentioned issues. The negotiations were intended to start at the ministerial conference of 1999 in Seattle, and be called the Millennium Round but, due to several different events including protest activity outside the conference (the so-called "Battle of Seattle"), the negotiations were never started. Due to the failure of the Millennium Round, it was decided that negotiations would not start again until the next ministerial conference in 2001 in Doha, Qatar. Just months before the Doha ministerial, the United States had been attacked by terrorists on September 11th, 2001. Some government officials called for greater political cohesion and saw the trade negotiations as a means toward that end. Some officials thought that a new round of multilateral trade negotiations could help a world economy weakened by recession and terrorism-related uncertainty. According to the WTO, the year 2001 showed "...the lowest growth in output in more than two decades," and world trade contracted that year. Doha, 2001 The Doha round officially began in November 2001, committing all countries to negotiations opening agricultural and manufacturing markets, as well as trade-in-services (GATS) negotiations and expanded intellectual property regulation (TRIPS). The intent of the round, according to its proponents, was to make trade rules fairer for developing countries. However, by 2008, critics were charging that the round would expand a system of trade rules here were bad for development and