weight to pursue a different agenda, and other developing countries accept the
legitimacy of their leadership role. Brazil and India in particular are able to play a more
active role in the WTO than China, whose restraint shows awareness of fears of smaller
trading partners about its export success.
The rationale for Australia and Brazil’s membership in the FIPs becomes clearer
when the share of agriculture in a country’s exports is considered. Their role may reflect
a combination of the salience of the issue for them and their relative share in world
markets. India does not figure among the major exporters, and agriculture, while a
major share of its workforce, is not a major share of its exports, but Indian participation
increases the legitimacy of the process in the eyes of other developing countries in the
G-33 concerned about the ability of their small farmers to withstand global competition.
The traditional leading players in the WTO still deploy powerful normative
resources in the ideological hegemony of the liberal view of the value of trade
liberalization, the evils of protectionism and the benign character of globalization. It is
possible that the EU and the USA could so organize the WTO as to extract all possible
benefits for themselves, although it is not clear what those benefits might be beyond the
mere existence of an open liberal multilateral system of trade and payments in which
their exporters have reasonable access to the world’s markets. That they do not try to
run the system for their exclusive benefit is obvious, however the system is assessed,
and however unfair the system may still be for some countries. Ideas of creating a
system that is fair to all matter a great deal (Kapstein 2005, 97). The coercive power of
the largest markets is also limited now by equally powerful normative claims based on
justice for developing countries, in general but especially for the poorest. As Alain Noel
shows, in recent years the discursive use of “poverty” has been changing (Noël 2005).
After the Cold War, poverty replaced “east/west” or “north/south” as a way to frame
left/right debate. Such normative change can alter the balance of power if claims on
behalf of poverty have weight in negotiations. Public recognition of the G-6 signals
acceptance of a changing configuration of world politics, giving developing countries
confidence that they are at the heart of the process.
Their growing awareness of their institutional power reinforces that centrality.
Two norms of the trade regime - the Single Undertaking and consensus decision-
making - create specific opportunities for relatively weak states to use institutional
power effectively. An example is the power to block consensus, used effectively by Latin
American countries during the Uruguay Round and by the G-20 group of developing
countries at the Cancùn Ministerial. Another example is the power to influence the
negotiating mandate of the round, used effectively by members of the Cairns Group of
agricultural exporters in the lead up to the Uruguay Round.
4.2 Changing issues
In the aftermath of the Uruguay Round, countries whose agriculture is dominated
by small-scale farmers oriented to domestic production discovered that they have a
different interest in trade reform than do those countries whose farmers operate at large