1.0 Introduction
For two decades agriculture has been the lynchpin of every meeting of the
world’s trade ministers. The Hong Kong ministerial conference of the World Trade
Organization (WTO) in December 2005 was no different. Once again, a multilateral
trade round is blocked by failure to agree on reform of farm trade, a traditional sector
representing less than 10% of world merchandise trade. But the current round differs
from earlier rounds: a number of new political coalitions have formed, unformed and
reformed, and the role of Canada seems obscure. The usual approaches to explaining
international economic outcomes consider political economy factors. In this paper I ask
if institutional factors are part of the problem, or the solution.
In the 1960s and 1970s the Europeans and Americans skirmished over
agriculture within the GATT while other countries stood on the sidelines, hoping that
there would be a transatlantic bargain, and that it would be beneficial for them. In the
1980s, smaller exporters banded together in the Cairns Group of “fair traders in
agriculture” to demand a place at the table in the Uruguay Round, and an important role
was played by the de la Paix group (a north/south group that pushed for a broadly
based agenda), and the G-10 (Brazil and India in a blocking role). A group of developing
countries with preferential access to EC markets were concerned that they would lose
market access, and a group of mostly African countries was concerned that
liberalization would increase world prices of key imported food products (Croome 1995,
113). In a harbinger of things to come, the 1988 and 1990 meetings of trade ministers
ended prematurely when a group of Latin American countries walked out to protest slow
progress on agriculture. Less visibly, an informal group of eight to ten of the main
participants met regularly over dinner to find consensus amongst the various negotiating
proposals that had been tabled (Croome 1995, 235).1 Once a transatlantic
understanding was reached at Blair House in 1992, the eventual multilateral deal on
agriculture was brokered first among the four leading players in farm trade, Australia,
the EC, Japan, and the USA.2
Press reports still include transatlantic recriminations about whether the EU or
the USA is doing enough to make a new trade deal possible, and the Cairns Group still
issues hortatory statements, but the stories now also refer to the differences between
such new entities as the G-20, the G-33, the G-10, the G-11, the G-90, the ACP Group,
and the African Group.3 The original Quad (USA, EU, Japan and Canada) that met
regularly at ministerial level from the end of the Tokyo Round in the 1970s through the
lengthy Uruguay Round negotiations to the early days of the WTO has not met at
1 The dinners hosted by a rotating chair included the original Quad plus Australia, New Zealand, Brazil,
sometimes Switzerland (on market access but not domestic support), Finland (representing the Nordics)
and Argentina.
2 The original Quad also played an important role in 1993 in bringing the round to a conclusion. For a
more complete story of the Uruguay Round, see (Wolfe 1998).
3 For a glossary of the groups, see Annex A. For a list of all their meetings in 2005, see Annex B.