evidence at the Doha ministerial, but the 2003 Cancùn ministerial was a shock because
it seemed to mark a clear break from the conventional pattern. The agriculture
negotiations initially continued the late Uruguay Round pattern on the assumption that
the process used by the first chair of the agriculture negotiations, Aart de Zeuw, in the
late 1980s was still valid. In the two years after the Doha ministerial, the then chair of
the agriculture negotiations, Stuart Harbinson, tried to force the pace of negotiations by
using the traditional technique of producing a chairman’s text. The Harbinson text of
early 2003 was a negotiating disaster that forced its author from office just as de Zeuw
and Arthur Dunkel had been forced out for similar efforts to advance the Uruguay
Round process (Croome 1995, 238-9, 295-6). With no text on the table, the Montreal
mini-ministerial of July 2003 asked the EU and the USA to produce a paper on
agricultural market access. Their paper was loudly rejected by a seemingly new
coalition of developing countries, the G-20. The rejection appeared to be the cause of
the collapse of the ministerial, bringing the Doha negotiations to a standstill. Less
noticed was the emergence at that meeting of other new developing country coalitions.
At Doha, the African Group, the ACP Group and the LDC Group had been active. In
Cancùn, those three started acting together as the G-90, in part to block discussion of
the so-called “Singapore issues”, while new groups were active on agriculture, notably
the G-33 and the G-10. Since Cancùn, the old certainties about the structure and
players in agriculture negotiations have been undermined.
The effort to restart the Doha round after the breakdown in Cancùn required
negotiations on agriculture within a ‘non-group’ (because not like-minded) of ‘Five
Interested Parties’ (EU, USA, Brazil, India and Australia). Having played an essential
role, the FIPs did not meet for more than six months after the new negotiating
framework was agreed in July 2004. Negotiators waited for a new Commission to take
office in Europe, and for a new US trade representative to be confirmed after the
Presidential election. The new ministers, Peter Mandelson and Rob Portman, did not
begin to pick up the pace until March 2005, and the limited usefulness of FIPs meetings
was quickly apparent. The EU was especially sensitive to the concerns expressed by
Members excluded from the FIPS, perhaps because it wished to dilute the group. Since
then, as shown in Annex B, the FIPs have met on occasion, but in recent months these
meetings have been accompanied by meetings of an expanded group (labeled FIPs
Plus) that notably included Canada and members of the G-10. Other groups have also
met more frequently and there have been meetings of a so-called "new Quad" or G-4 of
the EU, USA, Brazil and India, and then of a G-6 that adds Japan and Australia. At the
same time as these small cross-coalition groups proliferated, mini-ministerials
continued, and capital-based “senior officials” began to meet again.
4.0 Explanations for the Elaborate Agriculture Process
The process of WTO farm trade negotiations is now marked by extensive
discussion among groups with over-lapping membership in a way not seen before.
Three interlocking factors help illuminate, if not explain, this phenomenon: a changing
distribution of power in its various forms, new issues on the agenda, and the evolution