Ministers ready for make-or-break trade talks

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Geneva, Jul 18: From banana imports to rules for protecting the product names, officials and diplomats were working on Friday on a range of issues ahead of next week’s make-or-break ministerial trade negotiations.

But trade experts said the significance of next week’s Doha round talks goes far beyond the detail of tariff and subsidy cuts, signaling the international community’s ability to deal with major problems such as the food crisis.“If governments can’t even agree on a trade negotiation I’d like to know what they’re going to do in climate change over the next half a decade,” World Trade Organisation chief economist Patrick Low told a briefing.

WTO director-general Pascal Lamy called the Geneva meeting, which starts formally on Monday and is set to last a week, to push for a breakthrough in the long-running Doha round.

The talks have missed repeated deadlines since they were launched in late 2001 to open up world trade and help developing countries export their way out of poverty. But negotiators say there is a new sense of urgency, and even optimism, now.

Ministers from about 30 countries aim to clinch the outlines of a deal in the core areas of agriculture and industrial goods next week, to prevent the talks being sidelined by US elections and next year’s change in the White House.

Indian commerce minister Kamal Nath, arriving late on Thursday for talks ahead of the meeting, said any deal had to address the challenges of three “F’s” — finance, food and fuel.

“These three “F’s” are the backdrop against which these negotiations are being held,” he told reporters.World leaders from U.S. President George W Bush to Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva have called for a deal.A deal will see rich countries like the United States, Japan and EU members open up their markets for food by cutting farm tariffs and subsidies. In return tariff cuts in big emerging countries like India and Brazil will give them more access to markets for industrial goods and services.

Once ministers agree the terms of that framework, negotiators will apply the details in the coming months to thousands of tariff lines, and turn to other areas, from fisheries subsidies to rules for unfairly priced imports.

The question now is whether ministers can overcome the differences that divide developed and developing countries.

France, the European Union’s biggest food producer and current holder of its presidency, said the EU had exhausted its scope for concessions in agriculture.