While 735 chairmen or chief executives of the world's largest corporations were meeting for the CEO schmooze-fest known as the World Economic Forum in Davos, trade ministers from 25 countries gathered for a separate meeting to discuss the future of world trade.
The fact that this crucial and exclusive World Trade Organization mini-meeting takes place in the midst of some of the world's most powerful business leaders highlights who`s really pushing the agenda of WTO trade talks to date.

At last year's Davos forum, CEOs from Nestlé, Pfizer and BT cheered Bono, Angelina Jolie and Sharon Stone as they called on business to wage war against global poverty.
However, the multinationals' secretive corporate lobbying in the corridors of power does not have such an shiny, altruistic face. Big business is increasingly using its economic might to dictate government trade policies, and is indulging in a worldwide explosion of lobbying; there are now around 15,000 lobbyists based in Brussels (around one for every official in the European Commission) plus around 17,000 now in Washington DC (they outnumber US Congress lawmakers by 30 to one.
In WTO negotiations this comes at the expense of poor people, whose concerns are often sidelined or left out in the cold.

The cosy relationship between corporations and decision makers has recently been cast into the spotlight by the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal in the US. Abramoff used his position as a corporate lobbyist to curry and buy favours in Congress. He was not alone; from 1998 to 2004, US companies and lobby groups spent nearly $13bn influencing Congress.
ActionAid's new research on corporate lobbying - Under the Influence - shows that global corporations in the EU now have excessive influence over EU policy makers and are trying to force their way in the current trade talks. In 1998, Leon Brittan, the then EU trade commissioner, asked the chairman of Barclays Bank to form a lobby group for companies specifically to influence WTO negotiations on trade in services (such as banking, tourism, health, education and IT). Out of this discussion the European Services Forum (ESF) was born, with members including corporations such as Accenture, BT, DHL, IBM, Lloyds TSB. The office of the current EU trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, denies that ESF has privileged access to senior EU officials. This contradicts the statement by the managing director of ESF, Pascal Kerneis, who says: "We have regular emails with officials, we have telephone calls, we go to their meetings, they come to our meetings, we invite them, they invite us."

What might seem like a harmless cozy friendship becomes more sinister when it is put in the context of the current trade negotiations. For instance, in May 2005, Peter Mandelson met with an ESF-led delegation of European business leaders. The group wanted the EU to "insist on services being liberalised" at the WTO - which could forcing poor countries to remove economic barriers and giving EU countries access to new markets overseas.
As well as opening up telecoms, IT and banking sectors, this could lead to further privatisation of key basic necessities such as water, healthcare and education. Past experience of water privatisation schemes involving foreign multinationals in countries such as Bolivia, Argentina, Indonesia and Chile shows that poor people usually lose out. In South Africa, half a million people had their supplies cut off when their water was privatised.
The fingerprints of the corporations were all over the draft deal agreed at December's WTO meeting in Hong Kong. In return for small concessions on export agricultural subsidies, poor countries are being pushed to open up their industrial markets and service sectors to unfair foreign competition.

If the final WTO deal, due to be signed at the end of the current round of talks, is anything like the one agreed in Hong Kong, it could have a devastating impact on poor people. Instead of being a "development round" of talks to combat poverty, as rich countries promised, this agreement could make things worse.
With the corporate heavyweights in close proximity and many poor countries not even invited, the trade meeting at Davos is unlikely to mark a radical change in the direction of the negotiations. If so, poor countries must take a strong stand and reject the deal when the WTO has its next full meeting.

Aftab Alam Khan, Action Aid International, Pakistan, +92 300 852 3118