Trade ministers gear up for Pittsburgh G20

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Paris: Trade ministers want to point to concrete progress in the long-running Doha round to free up world trade in time for September's G20 summit in Pittsburgh, Australia said on Thursday.

Trade Minister Simon Crean, speaking after a meeting of his foreign counterparts in Paris hosted by Australia, said completing Doha would help pull the world out of the economic crisis because trade itself was an economic stimulus.

"The result of today's meeting was a restatement by ministers that we now are in the end-game of negotiations," Crean told a news conference.

The Doha round was launched in late 2001 to help poor countries prosper through trade, but in the nearly eight years since then the talks have stumbled repeatedly as trading powers clashed over proposals to cut tariffs and subsidies on goods from food to chemicals.

Crean said there was a new willingness to work together on a deal, spurred by the recession that was hitting developing countries hardest.

"I think the big dynamic that's changed is that leaders have said we want Doha concluded and we stand ready to assist in bringing it to that conclusion," Crean said.

World Trade Organisation (WTO) Director-General Pascal Lamy said the challenge now was to convert the improved atmospherics into a concrete deal.

"The mood music is now more congenial and it's playing at a faster pace. We now must shift from mood music to dance music," he told the news conference.

Talking To Each Other

Earlier US Trade Representative Ron Kirk called for a new approach to the Doha talks, involving direct negotiations with key trading partners as the traditional multilateral format was not working.

From the current incomplete package of deals it was clear what the United States would give up but hard to see exactly what it would gain, he said, given the many exceptions to an overall agreement for various countries, making the deal opaque.

"We think getting more clarity around that may be the key to helping us find a solution to a way forward," Kirk said after a meeting of ministers at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Developing countries had expressed fears they could be strong-armed into an unbalanced deal through a one-on-one approach.

But participants in the meeting at the Australian embassy said there was acceptance the WTO's traditional multilateral negotiations could be complemented by one-on-one talks to provide clarity about a likely deal, indicating a looming obstacle to the talks had been removed.