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Poor nations wary of failure

REUTERS, Cancun
The chairman of world trade talks proposed a compromise over the key sticking point of farm subsidies on Saturday but poor countries criticiszed the plan and said the meeting faced possible stalemate.
The compromise, put forward by Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez at the World Trade Organization talks in Mexico's beach resort of Cancun, called for the United States and Europe to make only modest concessions on their massive farm subsidy programs.
"At first sight, it is not enough. There are too many ambiguities," said Brazil's Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, a key figure in a broad alliance of developing countries.
"If there is not important movement in areas of interest to us, I think that there is a risk ... of going nowhere."
Other delegates from poor and
developing countries were even more critical.
"It is a bad document. Everything is bad. Agriculture is totally unbalanced. The plan aims merely to prize open developing country markets," an Asian delegate said.
Ministers need to find enough common ground before the meeting ends on Sunday to revive hopes of concluding by the end of 2004 a new trade pact that the World Bank says would add more than $500 billion a year to global incomes by 2015.
The draft compromise dangles the prospect of a date for phasing out rich-country farm export subsidies, a goal of poor nations that is sure to be contested by Europe's powerful farm lobbies.
For the first time, Derbez's 22-page proposed text also raised the possibility of negotiating a date by which to scrap all other export subsidies, in defiance of the EU's refusal to discuss specific deadlines.
In return, however, poor states would have to commit themselves to opening their own heavily protected agricultural markets, a central U.S. demand.
They would also have to agree to launch negotiations at a future date on rules governing foreign investment -- a key goal of Japan and Europe but fiercely opposed by more than 70 countries, led by India and Malaysia.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick said there were some positive elements to the plan and he hoped it would move talks forward at the 146-member WTO.
But poor nations were joined by aid groups in saying it did little to reform an unfair system that allows the EU, the United States and other rich countries to throw $300 billion a year of subsidies to their farmers.
Four West African producers complained the plan failed to even mention a deadline for phasing out
controversial cotton subsidies,
particularly in the United States.
Agriculture is the key issue because the livelihood of hundreds of millions of people globally depends on it.
Poor and developing countries joined in the so-called "Group of 21" have pushed a plan that would require the United States and the EU to make deep cuts in their domestic farm payments, slash tariffs and scrap export subsidies altogether.
They say the subsidies make it impossible for their own farmers to compete.
As negotiators struggled to find a deal, about 2,000 activists protested on the edge of Cancun's ritzy hotel zone.
Dozens were armed with shopping trolleys and garbage cans full of sticks and stones but there was only a few scuffles.