SURELY it will be more about nostalgia than trade negotiation strategies.
In September, ministers and farm leaders from the Cairns Group are being invited back to the place where it all began 20 years ago when a small group of middle-level agricultural exporters and importers met to form a group to lobby for trade liberalization.
Canada was represented at that first meeting and the political atmosphere at the Australian resort town in September 1986 was electric.
World trade talks were for the first time going to deal with agriculture and this group of medium sized trading nations from all continents were determined to play a role in pushing for trade liberalization and an end to the United States-European Union export subsidy war then beginning.
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Any reasonable reading of the history of the last world trade negotiation round would have to conclude that the Cairns Group had an impact in pushing for subsidy reductions and trade liberalization.
In the end, in the frantic negotiating months of late 1993, the final deal was cut by the U.S. and EU but the Cairns Group could take credit in creating the conditions that made a final deal a necessity.
So Cairns can look back with pride, but that was then. Now, Cairns is less relevant in the World Trade Organization mix and Canada’s involvement is tenuous even as a founding member since the majority view of the group has turned against the kind of protectionism required for preservation of supply management.
Key Cairns Group members now are part of other lobby groups at the WTO that are more pivotal. Cairns is not much of a player, which should provide interesting dynamics when ministers meet in late September to consider options.
No doubt, the discussion among ministers will be as much about whether Cairns matters as about how to get stalled trade talks going again.
And Cairns farm leaders who meet in a parallel session will have to decide who represents Canada.
The Canadian Federation of Agriculture, with its position balanced between exporters and protection for import-sensitive domestic sectors, has been the traditional Canadian representative.
The more single-minded anti-protection free trade group Canadian Agri-Food Trade Alliance has been invited to join.
Will Canada have two competing voices at Cairns, as well as at WTO talks?
Of course, the Cairns meeting will be faced with the question of what future awaits trade talks.
Trade pessimists imagine WTO talks are dead or at least will start up at some point without reference to concessions already on the table when talks collapsed in July.
For anti-WTO groups including the Council of Canadians and the National Farmers Union, this is the optimistic scenario. Trade optimists in this second scenario imagine the restart of talks several years down the road, perhaps by 2008, with the proposals on the table in July 2006 as the starting point.
That includes eventual elimination of export subsidies, sharp cuts in domestic supports and tariff barriers.
Beginning where it left off would not be good for Canada’s supply managed sectors or the Canadian Wheat Board but it would give some comfort to other export sectors.
Undoubtedly, scenario two is the future.
