THE G-20: PASSING PHENOMENON OR HERE TO STAY? CLODOALDO HUGUENEY History of the G-20 Since its establishment on August 20, 2003 the G-20 has awakened a lot of interest and raised all sorts of expectations in many quarters, some positive, others less so. Although the Group is very recent, perhaps a little history, concentrating on the circumstances that surrounded its creation, will contribute to clarifying its nature and purpose and help to understand its future role. The G-20 was established in the final phases of the preparation of the WTO Cancun Ministerial. Its agenda is focused on the central issue of the round: agriculture. The Group was integrated by developing countries from the three Continents and China. Its objective was to defend an outcome in the agricultural negotiations which would reflect the level of ambition of the Doha mandate and the interests of the developing countries. For this purpose, the Group adopted a common position that was circulated as an official document of the WTO, prior to and during Cancun(WT/MIN(03)/W/6). This position remains the central platform of the Group. In its initial composition, the Group had a majority of Latin American countries, but this started to change in Cancun, and some other countries left right after the Conference. Others, however, especially from Africa, joined the Group which has now 19 member countries: 3 from Africa, 8 from Asia and 8 from Latin America. Brazil has been coor­dinating the Group since its creation. The Group met frequently at the level of Heads of Delegation in Geneva prior to Cancun and continues to hold most of its meetings there. These meetings are plenary sessions. But there is also an informal group of five countries (Argentina, Brazil, China, India and South Africa) that meets at technical level to discuss specific proposals in the context of the WTO agriculture negotiations and to prepare technical papers in support of the common platform adopted by the Group. The frequent contacts and meetings at Ministerial level in Cancun consolidated the Group and made it possible for the G-20 to resist the strong pressures against its unity. As indicated above, there were some casualties, but the G-20 withstood the pressure and passed the test. The negotiations in Cancun The only area where there was active negotiation in Cancun was agriculture, and these negotia­tions took the form of Ministerial level meetings, chaired by the facilitator for Agriculture, Minister George Yeo, from Singapore. These meetings discussed the three pillars of the agriculture negotiations(domestic support, market access and export competition), taking as reference not only the text prepared by the Chairman of the General Council, Ambassador Pérez del Castillo, but individual proposals on the table, especially the one presented by the G-20. The significance of this procedure will become apparent later in this discussion. The negotiations on agriculture in Cancun took the form of rounds of consultations between the G-20, first with the EU and the US individually, and then a final round with the three. Of course, the facilitator also held consultations