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WTO on verge of new trade deal

REUTERS, Geneva
The World TYade Organisation is on the verge of an agreement to gel stalled global trade talks back on track after key poor and rich nations struck a hard-won deal to slash farm subsidies and open markets.
Following an all-night negotiating marathon, key members, including the United States, the European Union and Brazil, agreed on a package on Saturday that included the eventual elimination of export subsidies, long a major developing country demand.
"Agriculture is not a real stumbling block anymore, the feeling is that it's done even if there are some loose ends," said Gregor Kreuzhuber, a spokesman for EU Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fiscliler.
Agreement on the sensitive issue of agriculture should open the way for a similar understanding in the other key areas of the Geneva talks, which aim to revive the WTO's troubled Doha Round of free trade negotiations.
A successful conclusion of the
Doha round - still some years away - could inject some hundreds of billions of dollars into the world economy and lift over half a billion people out of poverty, according to thcWorldBank.
Fischlcr himself, who has been fiercely criticised by France, the biggest beneficiary of EU farm subsidies, for giving away too much, said the EU could "broadly accept" the farm deal.
"I think we can live with the package as it is," he told reporters at theWTO's headquarters.
A delegate from Mauritius, which has taken a leading part in the WTO talks on behalf of African nations, said that the so-called Group of 90 developing country alliance could also live with the text even if it did not get everything it wanted.
Any deal on the text beingnegoti-ated in Geneva, which also includes industrial goods, services and plans to harmonise customs' practices to curb corruption, would have to be signed off on by the full 147-member body of the WTO.
Failure would mean a virtual rerun of the collapse of world trade talks in Cancun, Mexico, last year, with the risk that further trade liberalisation would be delayed for years.
CONTRAST WITH CANCUN
The atmosphere at WTO headquarters, where the trade body has been rushing to meet an end of July deadline, was in contrast to the bitter mood in Cancun.
Diplomats from North and South all said they were committed to finding compromises.
However, there were still problems on the question of industrial tariffs, where developing countries were pressing for language that would qualify a text being put forward by WTO head Supachai Panitchpakdi and the chairman of the WTO's executive General Council, Sho taro Oshima — who are acting as mediators — to making clear that everything was being left open for a decision at a later stage in the Doha Round.
The EU, the United States and countries such as Japan and Switzerland, have set greater access to developing country markets for industrial goods as one of the conditions for agreeing to slash the subsidies they lavish on their farmers.
But the proposed text made clear that the poorest countries would not have to contribute to the market opening in any of the areas, including services.
The route to a farm deal, which was expected to be put to the full membership later on Saturday, had been speeded on Thursday after the United States and African cotton producers overcame their differences in the handling of a crop which is often held up as a prime example of how rich nation subsidies keep the poor out of world markets.
The revised farm text, hammered out by some 15 countries, all representing a wider range of interests within world trade, soften demands on developing countries to open their farm markets by giving the poorer ones a virtual free hand in determining which products to continue to protect.
At the same time, it leaves vague the criteria under which rich nations, many of whom also have highly sensitive products, such as rice in Japan, will be able to maintain some high barriers to Third World produce.
And the United States was forced to accept further negotiations -- again at some future phase in the round -- on its demand for flexibility on how it treats some of its farm support programmes that otherwise would be subject to tight restrictions.