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REsUMPTION OF TRADE TALKs

WTO chief gives members one month challenge

AFP, Geneva
The head of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on Wednesday gave countries one month to start agreeing on elements in the latest round of free trade talks or risk missing a deadline to complete the process.
At a meeting of the WTO's 146 member states in Geneva, the director general supachai Panitchpakdi welcomed a new willingness between delegates to discuss thorny topics such as farming but warned that time was running out.
The so-called Doha round of trade negotiations are due to conclude by January 1, 2005.
"We should be under no illusions
about the scale and the urgency of the tasks ahead of us," supachai said.
"There is a window of opportunity but it is a window that is closing rapidly," he told the meeting, according to his spokesman Keith Rockwell.
"In order to achieve the objective of the framework agreement by the summerbreak no time can be lost. Elements of a framework package ... should begin to emerge by the end of May," he said.
Last month, countries said they would try to reach an agreement on a concrete framework to push the round forward by the end of July.
"People have to start to get a pretty decent idea of what they are shooting for by the end of May,
because that would only leave two months for them to try to stitch everything together in a way that would be acceptable to everyone," Rockwell told a news conference after the meeting.
such a task is vital to ensure the second half of the year is not lost to domestic matters as powerful members such as the United states focus on leadership elections, while commissioners in the European Union are due to change.
Elections in India are already underway while south Africa also went to the ballot boxes over the weekend.
"We have elections going on everywhere," said Rockwell.
It was imperative that govern-
ments kept focused and overcome thorny problems such as subsidies on agriculture by rich countries and the high tariffs on farm imports from developing nations -- issues that divided WTO member states and left them unable to proceed at a meeting in Mexico last september.
"The coming days and weeks are critical for the Doha agenda and the multilateral trading system," supachai said.
"If no tangible result is made by the summer this would not just result in wasting the rest of this year but a good portion of next year as well," he warned.