The World Trade Organisation (WTO) has pressed Azerbaijan to speed up bilateral negotiations as part of its accession process, legal news website Law360 reported on July 31.

During the last round of talks held in Geneva, German ambassador to the WTO Walter Werner encouraged the Azerbaijani envoy, diplomat Mahmud Mammad-Guliyev, to advise his government to "proactively engage and advance market access negotiations" with the organisation's members because progress in the area of bilateral market access "has fallen behind other areas of negotiations".

Azerbaijan first applied to become a WTO member in 1997 and launched accession negotiations in 2004. Since then, the country has signed protocols with a mere five out of the 164 WTO members; protocols with two other countries - China and Moldova - are expected to be signed shortly, according to Mammad-Guliyev.

It is not uncommon for WTO negotiations to take decades in the former Soviet space. Russia famously took 18 years to negotiate its accession before becoming a member in 2012; Kazakhstan took 20 years and became a member in November 2015. But the pace at which Azerbaijan has conducted its negotiations reflects a lack of interest on Baku's part in joining the organisation any time soon.

Mammad-Guliyev told Werner that the country had undertaken a number of reforms over the last six months, including adopting 12 strategic roadmaps for the development of the economy, and that their implementation by 2020 would pave the way for the country's accession to the WTO.

Azerbaijan's main export is hydrocarbons, which it has successfully traded with EU member countries, Georgia and Turkey for over a decade without needing to become a WTO member. However, economic and particularly export diversification is at the core of a strategy to make the Azerbaijani economy more resilient, according to government officials including President Ilham Aliyev.

In recent years, Baku has sought to spur the development of agro-business - including canned fruit and vegetables and derivatives, cotton, manufacturing and pharmaceuticals. However, exporting such low value-added goods could be constrained to those countries with which Azerbaijan has signed free trade agreements, which include Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.