COMMENT
Trade Negotiations Minister Jim Sutton did not bother standing up to propose a toast to his New Zealand delegation last night.
Sutton, who had arrived in Cancun at midnight, had been in meetings from 7am Tuesday (Mexico time) until he finally sat down late evening for an informal dinner with top
Kiwi business representatives, agriculture lobbyists, a trade unionist, advisers and a late invitee - me.
While Sutton dined his officials were secreted away working on the New Zealand position statement he will deliver to the WTO today, after the formal summit opening by Mexican President Vincente Fox.
It had been a good day in Cancun for the New Zealand team.
In Sutton's words, "a new kid on the block had arrived that was big and burly".
The Group of 20 - a new grouping of developing nations led by Brazil, China and India - had laid down a public gauntlet to the rich agriculture protectionist nations, telling them to forget about fringe issues.
Unless the European Union, the United States and Japan gave way to a substantial liberalisation of agricultural trade the Cancun meeting would be stalemated.
Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, a driving force in this new group, emphasised it was not just protesting Mexican peasant farmers behind Cancun's high-security fences that were angry at the stance of rich protectionists.
Referring to Oxfam's Big Noise petition, which was presented to the WTO in Cancun by British rock band Coldplay, Amorim noted they had heard the 3 million voices and would carry on the fight within the WTO.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who was directly lobbied in a phone call from US President George W. Bush, rammed the point home: If there is no progress in relation to the barriers Brazilian farm exports face, there will not be any progress in other areas to be discussed in Cancun.
But it was a decision by the Group of 20 and the Cairns Group of agricultural exporting nations, to which New Zealand belongs, to merge interests that has really changed the balance at this WTO ministerial meeting.
The "four boxes" parallel that EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy uses to illustrate who will ultimately decide what gets finalised has effectively been reduced to three.
It will be much more difficult now for the EU and the US - which have already put a joint agriculture offer on the table - to be able to play the developing nations bloc off against the Cairns Group to achieve a soft deal.
"What we're doing is we're coming together because we face a common enemy and the enemy is dumped surplus of subsidised exports from the rich industrialised nations," Sutton told a Cairns Group press conference in comments that were immediately flashed on world news wires.
He had earlier shown an implacable face to US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick when he turned up for a meeting with the Cairns Group.
Zoellick was a bit nonplussed by the failure of the Cairns Group to ask lots of questions and enter into debate, recalled Sutton in his laconic drawl. People have to digest a lot of new information and do not want to go off half-cocked.
Had the balance of power changed irrevocably?
"It was certainly a possibility and everyone knows it."
Sutton's hotel, the Fiesta Americana Grand Coral Beach, is one of Cancun's most salubrious. At US$212 ($360) a night it offers fabulous views and a first-class open air restaurant which sports down-to-earth Mexican fare such as fajitas among popular international dishes.
It also has shark nets, unlike the Melia Turqueza some 10km down the road where holidaymakers quickly vacated the warm Caribbean waves as a 3m grey shark chased a stingray into the shallows. The shark did not score. But neither will the EU or US do much business at the WTO unless they make further concessions on agriculture.
A meeting with European Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler was polite.
But neither was in any doubt of the other's position.
"I put our views as to what is necessary to conclude the round and what the EU should do, especially in relation to export subsidies," said Sutton.
His response as ever was that that was not something he had a mandate to do.
COMMENT
Trade Negotiations Minister Jim Sutton did not bother standing up to propose a toast to his New Zealand delegation last night.
Sutton, who had arrived in Cancun at midnight, had been in meetings from 7am Tuesday (Mexico time) until he finally sat down late evening for an informal dinner with top
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