Box 11: The role of public relations in the Тcotton caseУ

Since the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture could not approach directly the West African cotton producing countries to see whether they would be willing to join Brazil as co-complainants in the case Brazil was willing to launch against the US in front of the Dispute Settlement Body of the WTO (the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations opposed it, fearing the US authoritiesХ reaction), Pedro de Camargo - Brazilian Deputy Minister of Agriculture - met with CЋline Cherveriat, Head of Advocacy for Oxfam, who then got in touch with the four West African cotton producing countries. NGOs - including Oxfam - also consulted with these countries to convince them to join BrazilХs case as third parties. Oxfam and IDEAS Centre (a Swiss NGO) worked along with the West African countries on alternative ways to bring forward their demands on cotton, and used their contacts in the media to Тmake it a moral case and win it in the public eyeУ, as stated by CЋline Cherveriat. ТFrom the beginning, OxfamХs strategy was to bring it down from something legalistic that nobody would understand to the most important story: the impact on farmers on the groundУ (Goldberg, Lawrence, Milligan 2004)[72]. The cotton case became a test of whether the international trading system could work for the poor.

Although Brazil was not behind all these initiatives, they made the initial decision to involve the developed countriesХ civil society in the debate and fed them with information that could be useful to present the case to the public opinion. This opened a second front in the ТbattleУ, a parallel track to the legal case. And it had undoubtedly a big influence in putting cotton on top of the agenda in the run up to the WTO Cancњn Ministerial Conference.

Source: Goldberg, Lawrence and Milligan, 2004

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