Comment: G–77. (1991, 20 Marks)
The Group of 77 is the largest coalition of developing countries in the United Nations. It formed on 15 June 1964, at the close of the first UNCTAD conference in Geneva, when 77 states issued a Joint Declaration. It now has 134 members but keeps its founding name, working as “the Group of 77 and China”. It is not a regional organisation but a trans-regional bargaining coalition: the economic counterpart of the Non-Aligned Movement, organising the South around development rather than security.
Origins and organisation
- Intellectual roots: Raúl Prebisch’s structuralism (he was UNCTAD’s first Secretary-General) and the Prebisch–Singer thesis of declining terms of trade for primary producers held that the world economy, not domestic failure, kept the periphery poor. Mahbub ul Haq’s The Poverty Curtain (1976) gave the case a South Asian voice.
- Institutions: the Charter of Algiers (1967) gave the Group a permanent structure. Chapters sit in Geneva, Nairobi, Paris, Rome, Vienna and Washington (the G-24). The chair rotates annually among Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America; Uruguay took over from Iraq in January 2026.
- Method: agree a common position, then use the one-state-one-vote majority in the General Assembly and UNCTAD.
Achievements
- Trade preferences: the Generalised System of Preferences (agreed at UNCTAD II, New Delhi, 1968) and the Enabling Clause (1979), the root of special and differential treatment in the WTO.
- The NIEO moment: the 1974 Declaration and Programme of Action for a New International Economic Order, and the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, asserting permanent sovereignty over natural resources.
- South–South instruments: the Common Fund for Commodities and the Global System of Trade Preferences (1988).
- Norm-setting: the “common heritage of mankind” in the law of the sea, and common but differentiated responsibilities in the 1992 climate convention. Under Pakistan’s chairmanship in 2022, the Group drove the loss-and-damage fund agreed at COP27.
Limits and critiques
- Numbers without power: Stephen D. Krasner (Structural Conflict, 1985) argued the South sought authoritative, rule-based allocation because it lacked market power. Resolutions bind no one, and where weighted voting rules (IMF, World Bank) its majority counts for little.
- Heterogeneity: oil exporters and importers, newly industrialising and least developed economies want different things. The 1973 oil shock lent the Group leverage but hurt many of its members, and Northern governments exploited such splits. Mexico left on joining the OECD in 1994.
- The debt crisis and the Washington Consensus pushed members into one-to-one IMF programmes; by 1991, with the Cold War over, the Group’s leverage was at its lowest.
- The China ambiguity: the second-largest economy and a major creditor sits beside the least developed.
- Issue coalitions: G-20 and G-33 at the WTO, BASIC and small islands in climate talks.
Contemporary relevance and India
The Group has revived as “Global South” politics. It held a South Summit at Kampala (January 2024), pushed the Seville financing-for-development outcome (2025), and defends UNCTAD, which a US memorandum of 7 January 2026 listed among bodies to quit. Its 50th annual ministerial meeting met in September 2026. India, a founding member and host of UNCTAD II, combines G-77 solidarity with its Voice of the Global South Summits (2023–24) and its G20 diplomacy, which won the African Union a permanent G20 seat. This is S. Jaishankar’s multi-alignment in practice.
Conclusion
The G-77 never achieved the structural change it sought, but it succeeded as an agenda-setter and veto bloc: it embedded preferences, differentiation and development in global rules. Its future depends on shared interests on issues such as climate finance, debt and technology rather than on the redistributive programme of 1974.