Trade negotiations and developing countries Negotiating Trade: Developing Countries in the WTO and NAFTA. Cambridge, Cambridge Edited by John S. Odell Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. xi, 298 Behind the Scenes at the WTO: The Real World of International Trade Negotiations By Fatoumata Jawara and Aileen Kwa London New York, Bangkok: Zed Books in association with Focus on the Global South, updated edition, 2004, pp. lxxxv, 329

The WTO, we hope, is an institution that mutes the importance of raw power – provides a system for working out problems among countries in which the interests of smaller countries are not always overwhelmed by those of larger. The two books reviewed both address this issue, but in different ways. The Odell volume (a collection of studies by different analysts) reviews a number of WTO events in which developed and developing country interests were at odds; e.g., the ‘bananas dispute’ involving Ecuador, the US, and the European Communities. The studies in that volume document the skill of developing country negotiators to use the system to their advantage; they demonstrate that the WTO process often came to outcomes more favorable to smaller countries than a simple weighing of relative power would imply.