investment policies, competition policies, and government procurement, as well as trade facilitation. They feared that enforceable WTO rules on how long customs could take to process shipments, on insurance standards, warehousing and related issues, would burden them with extra costs and allow rich powers to bully them. EU pressure to accept talks, backed strongly by Japan, was partly the cause of the collapse of a ministerial conference in Cancun, Mexico, in September 2003 which was supposed to push ahead the WTO's current Doha Round of free trade talks. But work by U.N. bodies in Geneva such as the UNCTAD trade and development agency, the International Trade Centre (ITC) and the Economic Commission for Europe helped convince poorer countries they could gain from easing cross-border flows. Some 40 percent of the trade of developing countries in manufactured goods is now with other nations at similar economic levels, and border delays and complicated export and import procedures push up costs for their consumers.
