Democracy at work?

With 148 members, each with equal voting rights, the World Trade Organization (WTO) is both democratic and unwieldy. Officials from India boast about how they alone, a single member, were able to delay final agreement on starting the Doha Round until one of their sticking points had been resolved.

In the days of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the WTO's predecessor, the United States and the European Union backed up by Japan and Canada in the 'Quad Group' essentially ran the show.

The incorporation of agriculture into trade negotiations in the Uruguay Round combined with the growing political and economic power of several major developing countries with growing weight in international trade have seen often overlapping groupings of nations with shared, but not identical interests, emerging.

The FIPS (Five interested parties)

The most influential negotiating group comprises the United States, the EU, India, Brazil and Australia. It brings together major trading countries whose interests cover the three pillars of the Doha negotiations: trade in agriculture, manufactured goods and services. A 'FIPS-plus' negotiating group of up to 14 WTO members which has included (among others) Argentina, China, Benin and Malaysia, has been a key forum for agricultural negotiations. But the poorest countries are under-represented.

The G20

This is the power-centre for industrialising countries like Brazil, India and China. But, trade negotiators wonder, when will it start to play a creative role in the negotiations and stretch its mandate beyond the confines of agriculture?

The G20 emerged shortly before the 5th WTO Ministerial Conference in Canc�n in 2003 and effectively ensured that those talks foundered and that the US and the EU were no longer going to be able to hold the ring alone. Countries like South Africa, Nigeria, Pakistan and Thailand are members. In Cancún some Central American countries were on the fringe, but were forced to distance themselves under pressure from the US.

An Asian diplomat says that the G20 is coherent enough to be able to designate two or three representatives to attend wider WTO negotiating sessions - the idea of an Indian being delegated to present Chinese views gives a flavour of the significance of this.

While it is proactive in tabling its own views on agriculture, the fact that it has not moved formally on manufactured goods and services makes some negotiators ask whether it can make the transition from being a blocker to a builder of consensus. Other observers who have seen the G20 at close quarters say its reticence is a negotiating tactic, not an inability to act.

Successful global trade rounds require that countries or regions like the EU, who make concessions on agriculture, for example, need victories in other areas, such as manufactured goods tariffs, in order to come away with a deal they can sell to their governments, parliaments and industrial and consumer lobbyists.

The G90

This is the grouping which includes the separate sub-group of the 77 countries of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (APC) formation. They had an emergency trade summit in Brussels last week in a last-ditch effort to hammer out language for Hong Kong aimed at ensuring that their interests, those of the world's poorest countries, would not get shunted aside.

As one trade ambassador for the group explained last week, the poorest countries have been pressured by the emerging power of the G20 to try to come up with common positions on agricultural issues. "If we fail to work together and defend our interests we will be swamped by China both at the negotiating table and in world markets," he remarked. The problem for these groupings (there are other smaller developing country groups too) is that they are large, represent diverse interests, are unwieldy and unable to respond swiftly as negotiating timetables get tight. This limits their ability to be a positive force in reaching compromises. But, says a top trade official, they are learning from each other and sharing experience.

The Cairns Group

This is the only group with an exclusively agricultural trade focus. Its 17 members bring together a mixture of developed countries, such as Canada, with important richer and poorer developing countries like Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, Costa Rica and Indonesia. Its chair is held by Australia, which as a FIPS member gives it extra clout. But Cairns has lost some influence because of the emergence of the G20.

The NGOs

Love them or hate them, and many trade officials veer towards the second camp, non-governmental organisations such as Oxfam, Christian Aid, Third World Network and Co-ordination Sud, have become important players on trade and development issues. Governments try to manipulate them - as the British did at the Gleneagles G8 summit in July - but they have to deal with them. The strength of the best ones (and there are scores who are weak) is that they employ intelligent experts who have a better grasp of the details than many journalists and experts from developing countries and they have links to aid workers in the field. They also communicate their messages simply and clearly to the media. Their weaknesses are their ideological bias - even developing country officials say this - and the fact that, since they are not at the negotiating table looking for compromises, they often present a picture that is unrealistic (critics would say irresponsible) in terms of the goal of reaching an agreement.

• Stewart Fleming is a freelance journalist based in Brussels.

Article takes a look at the most influential negotiating groups at the WTO Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong, 13-18 December 2005. Article is part of a European Voice Special Report: 'WTO negotiations'.

WTO: The WTO: Ministerial Conferences: The Sixth WTO Ministerial Conference, Hong Kong, China, 13-18 December 2005 http://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/minist_e/min05_e/min05_e.htm

---