Developing Country Coalitions in WTO Negotiations: How cohesive would IBSAC (India, Brazil, South Africa, China) be?

BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) has emerged as a role model for the developing countries at large by building a sustainable dialogue on major policy issues. The ongoing stalemate at the Doha Round of Discussions under WTO is creating a major hurdle for the developing countries. In that context, the present analysis explores whether the WTO Member countries of BRICS, i.e., India, Brazil, South Africa and China (IBSAC), who possess tremendous potential to become the drivers of global economic growth, can also play a significant role at the multilateral negotiations for protecting developing country interests. IBSA is already an operational Dialogue Forum focusing on South-South Cooperation. IBSAC countries have earlier collaborated together in multilateral negotiations (e.g. G-20 for agriculture), but there exist considerable scope to improve the same further. The present analysis reveals that the IBSAC countries need time to become a formidable negotiating collaboration, given their presence in world trade. Also, the deeper trade reform already undertaken by China vis-à-vis IBSA countries makes collaboration between them on every WTO aspect difficult. The analysis indicates that IBSA would remain a more coherent bargaining coalition at WTO, while China would collaborate with it only when mutual interests overlap. It is however likely that the existing trade barriers in developed country markets would continue to provide opportunities for IBSAC to collaborate at times.