(Prantl 2005; Sureda 2003). Most of the negotiating groups meet for a week at a time,
but they only meet in plenary session at the beginning and the end of the week, and
then only briefly, for transparency. The real work is done in informal meetings of the
various small groups, or in restricted meetings organized by the chair, or in bilateral
sessions. Some of these off-the-record meetings are held in the WTO building (e.g. so-
called Room F and Green Room meetings), but others are held in the offices of
delegations, or in mini-ministerials in Member countries. Annex B shows how many of
these informal meetings related to agriculture were held in 2005. The norms governing
all this talk have been the subject of considerable reflection since the third Ministerial
Conference in Seattle in 1999, which clearly failed in part for institutional design
reasons. Too many Members did not know what was happening, did not feel a part of
the process, and did not see their issues being addressed.
Active procedural discussions among Geneva ambassadors were part of the
response to Seattle.5 Members now better understand the so-called “Green Room”
process that involves 30 or so Members in searching for compromises in the overall
negotiations. The secretariat is becoming more sophisticated at knowing which
representatives of groups should be invited to participate in restricted meetings, and the
groups themselves are better organized. Although it is impossible for an outsider to
know who attends a Green Room meeting, we do know who attends mini-ministerials,
and the principles are presumably similar. The members of the original Quad are always
represented along with other leading traders, representatives of coalitions, and
coordinators of the regional groups. These criteria are not written down, but everyone
knows what they are (Blackhurst and Hartridge 2004: 712). It is important that everyone
understand this process, and that it remain flexible to allow different configurations as
the negotiating challenges shift. No group of countries should have to create negotiating
obstacles only so that they can get a representative in the room, and no Member should
have to block consensus because it did not know what was going on.
3.0 Proliferation of Groups: Agriculture in the Doha Round
The sixth ministerial meeting of the WTO in Hong Kong was an important way
station in the current round of multilateral trade negotiations, launched at Doha, Qatar in
2001. The mandate for the agriculture negotiations, which actually began in 2000 in
accordance with the Final Act of the Uruguay Round, is set out in paragraph 13 of the
Doha Development Agenda. Negotiators had hoped to agree on a negotiating
framework by the time of the Cancùn ministerial conference of 2003, but it was only
completed in the General Council as part of the “July Framework” in 2004. Subsequent
negotiations attempted to prepare an agreement in Hong Kong on the multilateral
“modalities”, or how the actual negotiations on export subsidies, domestic support and
market access will proceed.
The group process has been evolving since the creation of the WTO, especially since
the 1999 Seattle ministerial conference, and new patterns of coalition activity were in
5
5 For a discussion of WTO process and how it has evolved, see (Wolfe 2004; and, Wolfe 2005a).