The WTO Decision-making Process
One of the key reasons for the collapse of the World Trade Organization ministerial in Seattle in December 1999 was the absence of transparent decisionmaking. Stories abound of ministers from developing countries complaining of being lost at the Seattle Convention Center, looking for a "Green Room" where key decisions would be made, not knowing that the Green Room did not refer to a real room at the convention center but to an exclusive process of decisionmaking.

During the WTO ratification process in 1994, partisans of the new trade organization portrayed it as a one-country/one-vote organization where the United States would actually have the same vote as Rwanda. In truth, the WTO is not governed democratically via a one country-one vote system like UN General Assembly or through a system of weighted voting like the World Bank or the IMF. While according to its constitution, it is a one country/one vote system, "consensus" is the process that reigns in the World Trade Organization, one that it took over from the old GATT, where the last time a vote was taken was in 1959.

Consensus, in practice, is a process whereby the big trading countries impose their consensus on the less powerful countries. As C. Fred Bergsten, a prominent partisan of globalization who heads the Institute of International Economics, put it during US Senate hearings on the ratification of the GATT-WTO Agreement in 1994, the WTO does "does not work by voting. It works by a consensus arrangement which, to tell the truth, is managed by four-the Quads: the United States, Japan, European Union, and Canada…Those countries have to agree if any major steps are going to be made. But no votes."

Though the Ministerial and the General Council are theoretically the highest decisionmaking bodies of the WTO, decisions are arrived at not in formal plenaries but in non-transparent backroom sessions known as the "Green Room," after the color of the Director General's room at the WTO headquarters in Geneva. With surprising frankness, at a press conference in Seattle, shortly after the ministerial collapse, then US Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky described the dynamics and consequences of the Green Room: "The process, including even at Singapore as recently as three years ago, was a rather exclusionary one. All the meetings were held between 20 and 30 key countries…And this meant 100 countries, 100, were never in the room…[T]his led to extraordinarily bad feeling that they were left out of the process and that the results even at Singapore had been dictated to them by the 25 to 30 countries who were in the room."

Barshefsky admitted that "the WTO has outgrown the processes appropriate to an earlier time. An increasing and necessary view, generally shared among the members, was that we needed a process which had a greater degree of internal transparency and inclusion to accommodate a larger and more diverse membership." This was backed up by UK Secretary of State Stephen Byers who stated that the "WTO will not be able to continue in its present form. There has to be fundamental and radical change in order for it to meet the needs and aspirations of all 134 of its members."

Non-Transparency and Non-Democracy at Doha
Did anything change in the lead-up to Fourth Ministerial in Doha? No, the same non-transparency and lack of any modicum of democratic decision-making remained. Let me go through the process in some detail.

The proposed draft declaration for the Ministerial meeting was an example of the sort of non-transparent tactics that the big trading powers resorted to. In the lead-up to Doha, most of the developing countries were pretty much united around the position that the Ministerial would have to focus on implementation issues and on reviews of key WTO agreements, not on launching a new round of trade liberalization.

But when the draft declaration came out a few weeks before Doha, the emphasis was not on dealing with implementation issues, but on an alleged consensus on opening up negotiations on the issues of competition, investment policy, government procurement, and trade facilitation that were the priorities of the minority of rich and powerful trading countries. "Despite clearly stated positions that the developing countries are unwilling to go into a new round until past implementation and decision-making are addressed," noted Aileen Kwa, who followed the process closely, "the draft declaration favorably positioned the launching of a comprehensive new round with an open agenda."

The draft, which was authored by the chair of the General Council, was a product of consultations conducted mainly among an inner circle of about 20-25 participants--the so-called Green Room process that effectively excludes most of the members of the WTO. In the lead-up to Qatar, this exclusive process held two "mini-Ministerials," one in Mexico at the end of August and another in Singapore on October 13-14. How one got invited to these meetings was very murky. Aileen Kwa cites the case of one ambassador from a transition economy who was promised an invitation to a Green Room meeting by the WTO Secretariat but never got one. Then there was the case of an African ambassador who wanted to attend the Singapore mini-ministerial: When he approached the WTO secretariat for an invitation, he was told that they were not hosting the meeting. When he tried the Singapore mission in Geneva, the response was that they were simply coordinating the meeting and were not in a position to send out invitations.

The Doha ministerial from Nov. 9 to 14., 2001, took place amidst conditions that were already unfavorable from the point of view of developing country interests. The September 11 events provided a heaven-sent opportunity for US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick and European Union Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy to step up the pressure on the developing countries to agree to the launching of a new trade round, invoking the rationale that it was necessary to counter a global downturn that had been worsened by the terrorist actions. The location was also unfavorable, Qatar being a monarchy where dissent could be easily controlled. The WTO Secretariat's authority over who would be granted visas to enter Qatar for the ministerial allowed it to radically limit the number of legitimate NGO's that could be present, thus preventing that explosive interaction of developing country resentment and massive street protest that took place in Seattle.

Still, these factors would not have been sufficient to bring about an unfavorable outcome. Tactics mattered, and here the developing countries were clearly outmaneuvered in Doha. Among these tactics the following must be highlighted:

• Pushing the highly unbalanced draft declaration and presenting it to the ministerial as a "clean text" on which there allegedly was consensus, thus restricting the arena of substantive discussion and making it difficult for developing countries to register fundamental objections without seeming "obstructionist."
• Pitting officials from the capitals against their negotiators based in Geneva, with the latter being characterized as "recalcitrant" or "narrow."
• Employing direct threats, as the United States did when it warned Haiti and the Dominican Republic to cease opposition to its position on government procurement or risk cancellation of their preferential trade arrangements.
• Buying off countries with goodies, as the European Union did when, in return for their agreeing to the final declaration, it assured countries in the ACP (Africa-Caribbean-Pacific) group that the WTO would respect the so-called "ACP Waiver" that would allow them to export their agricultural commodities to Europe at preferential terms relative to other developing countries. Pakistan, a stalwart among developing countries in Geneva, was notably quiet at Doha. Apparently, this had something to do with the US's granting Pakistan a massive aid package of grants, loans, and debt reduction owing to its special status in the US war against terrorism. Nigeria had taken the step of issuing an official communique denouncing the draft declaration before Doha, but came out loudly supporting it on November 14-a flip-flop that is difficult to separate from the US's coming up with the promise of a big economic and military aid package in the interim.
• Reinstituting the infamous "Green Room" on November 13 and 14, when some 20 handpicked countries were isolated from the rest and "delegated" by the WTO secretariat and the big powers to come up with the final declaration. These countries were not picked by a democratic process, and efforts by some developing country representatives to insert themselves into this select group were rebuffed, some gently, others quite explicitly, as was the case with a delegate from Uganda.
• Finally, pressuring the developing countries by telling them that they would bear the onus for causing the collapse of another ministerial, the collapse of the WTO, and the deepening of the global recession that would allegedly be the consequence of these two events.

Doha was a low point in the GATT-WTO's history of backroom intimidation, threats, bribery, and non-transparency. But take it from the horse's mouth itself: no less than the EU's Trade Commissioner, Pascal Lamy, described the Doha process as "medieval." Surprisingly, at a recent speech in Geneva, WTO Director General Mike Moore endorsed this view.

There are no records of the actual decision-making process in Doha because the formal sessions of the ministerial--which is where decision-making is made in a democratic system-were, as in Seattle, reserved for speeches, and the real decisions took place in informal groupings whose meeting places kept shifting and were not known to all. There being no records, there is little accountability and the principals in any deals can deny that they engaged in questionable behavior.

• Global Trends in Access to Information
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• The Next Challenge: Making Global Institutions More Transparent
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