Trade diplomats intensify talks despite frictions

from Yahoo News

By Jonathan Lynn

GENEVA (Reuters) - Diplomats sought on Monday to overcome the strains in global trade talks with intensified negotiations, but some warned that growing frictions could further delay a deal.

The World Trade Organization's (WTO) 151 members will hear this week an update on progress in agriculture, and the industry talks' chairman Don Stephenson has scheduled meetings to help solve rich-poor tensions that boiled over last week.

Stephenson, Canada's ambassador to the WTO, is set to hold intensive talks with small groups of developing countries to ease their tough stance on manufacturing tariffs that triggered sharp rebukes from the United States and European Union.

The latest tensions may have set back efforts to wrap up the broad outlines of a Doha round accord by the end of this year.

"We are hoping to have the framework for the final stages of negotiation, particularly in agriculture and industrial products, by the end of the year," the U.S. ambassador to the WTO, Peter Allgeier, told Reuters.

Diplomats had previously been talking in terms of narrowing their differences in revised texts for agriculture and industry texts by late October or early November.

Indian Trade Minister Kamal Nath planned to meet WTO chief Pascal Lamy in London late on Monday to discuss India's views on industrial goods as well as the position with U.S. fast-track trade legislation, which lapsed in June.

Lamy, speaking at the London School of Economics, said last week's heated exchanges between developed and developing countries could be a good sign.

"We are in a period where the temperature is high which in many ways is good. I interpret these signals as ... positioning at a time where we may be reaching a crucial point. I take this as a sign that things may be becoming really serious," he said.

DOHA DEVELOPMENT AIMS

Launched nearly six years ago, the WTO's latest free trade round is meant to boost the global economy and help developing countries grow out of poverty by removing barriers to trade. It was first meant to be concluded by January 2005.

To come into effect, negotiators must reach consensus in all areas of the talks, which also include services.

Last week's disagreements turned on the cuts in tariffs that developed and developing countries would make under a compromise proposal issued by Stephenson in July.

A large number of developing countries said the proposed formula required them to make bigger cuts than rich countries, contradicting the development aims of the Doha round.

Others also say that opening their markets to manufacturers from rich countries will keep them from building their own industries, condemning them to be suppliers of food and raw materials to the rich world.

But as the poorest and smallest developing countries would be exempt from all or most of the proposed tariff cuts, some developed powers said such arguments may be exaggerated.

"I'm concerned that they are going to overplay their hand. But maybe many of them have decided that they don't want a deal," one rich-nation diplomat said.

Diplomats now expect the revised texts on industry and agriculture in late November. That may not leave enough time for ministers at a big WTO meeting on aid for trade on November 20 to bed them down into a broader agreement, though a deal could be possible in December.

(Additional reporting by Sujata Rao, Jeremy Gaunt and Adrian Croft in London)