Early on the morning of 17 December, the second ranking member of the US negotiating team came out with the first reasonably upbeat forecast for the ministerial conference of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) at Hong Kong. Delegations, huddled in intense and often acrimonious bargaining over four days, had the historic opportunity to close out a deal that would enshrine the developmental dimensions of international trade, said Peter Allgeier, Deputy U.S. Trade Representative and Ambassador to the WTO. But time was of the essence: just over a day remained for the conference to run its course and those 24 hours indeed, would test the will of the international community in doing what was fair for the developing countries.
Just the previous evening, the developing countries had shown themselves united as never before within WTO councils. Addressing a media conference, the Brazilian foreign minister Celso Amorim, spoke of a new dynamic in WTO negotiations. "This is a historic moment", he announced, and a "revolution" was "graphically" unfolding in WTO affairs. For the first time in a ministerial conference, "developing countries were harmonising their positions across a wide range" of issues. Accompanying the Brazilian minister at the event, were the heads of delegation from India, Mauritius, Egypt, Zambia, Indonesia and Jamaica, representing between them a diverse range of country groupings – often overlapping – the G20, the Africa Caribbean and Pacific, the Africa Group, the Least Developed Countries, the G33, the G90 and the small and vulnerable economies. Arithmetical skills being at a premium in the hothouse of the ministerial conference, the gathering adopted the simplest technique of adding the numbers of its smallest and largest groupings, to arrive at the figure of 110 members. That little artifice apart, the event was momentous in the scope of shared interests it brought to the bargaining table.
Politics of agriculture
The manifest sense of impatience seemed entirely appropriate for the fourth day of a ministerial conference that had seen much time wasted in diversionary manoeuvres by the WTO's two big players, the United States and the European Union. Agriculture was the focus of the conference from literally the moment it kicked off; and within this track of negotiations, the vast subsidies that the developed nations maintain came in for much adverse notice.
There were of course reasonable grounds to question whether agriculture was the key that would unlock the developmental potentialities of the poorer countries. In particular, the populous countries of Southasia, which have little by way of an agricultural surplus and indeed, continue to depend on imports to meet vital gaps in their nutritional baskets, have little to gain from trade liberalisation. Yet India joined Brazil, Argentina and other major agricultural exporters in the G20 grouping to demand movement in agriculture before any other issue could be addressed.