WTO delays key farm talks

Trade negotiators have postponed talks due late next week on reforming agriculture markets, officials said yesterday, amid gathering gloom over an end-July deadline for a draft deal to liberalise world commerce.

The postponement, announced by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), came a day before ministers of a core group of five trade powers, including the European Union and United States, were to meet in Paris to try to push the negotiations ahead.

EU and US envoys will then meet poor and developing nations in Mauritius next week to try to win their agreement to an outline accord on liberalising world trade by July 31.

Veteran trade negotiator and first WTO head Peter Sutherland said in the Financial Times that "failure this month would mean we had not moved one jot from the Doha Declaration," referring to the Qatari capital where the current round of trade talks began in late 2001. "The Doha round would, in effect, be dead."

Envoys say that if the end-July date is missed, effective talks can only resume next year, after US presidential elections and a change of the European Commission in November.

A full trade accord, covering tariffs on industrial goods and services as well as on farm goods, was originally due by the end of this year. But diplomats and trade analysts say a final deal, which economists argue would give fresh vigour to the world economy, is now unlikely before 2007 at best.

Trade sources said the WTO farm talks, which were to have been held on July 14-16, could take place just a few days later - but that moves them closer to the deadline.

There was no immediate explanation for the delay, but there are still differences among and between rich and poor members of the WTO over how to move ahead in the negotiations.

Some envoys said the delay became inevitable when the chairman of the WTO farm talks, New Zealand's ambassador Tim Groser, said he could not produce a draft accord on how a final agriculture pact would be negotiated until later next week.

The end-July outline deal is aimed at making up for ground lost when world trade talks collapsed in Cancun last September.