Reuters PARIS: The European Union outlined to the United States on Tuesday how it might improve on its agricultural offer in a long-delayed global trade round and said the next move must come from Washington, an EU official said.
EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson and Susan Schwab, who is expected to be confirmed as U.S. Trade Representative this week, discussed in Paris the World Trade Organization s (WTO) Doha round of negotiations which risk running out of time soon. It was a business-like conversation, Mandelson told reporters after the meeting which took place on the sidelines of a conference of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. We get on and we can do business together. The EU official, who asked not to be named, said the discussion included how the EU could improve on its farm trade offer, by reducing the number of sensitive goods to be shielded from the biggest cuts and adjusting tariff-cutting formulae. The EU has long been criticized for not offering enough access to its farm markets in order to make the United States move further on cutting subsidies for its farmers and big developing countries like Brazil cut industrial goods tariffs. That so-called triangle of key issues is considered the key to unlocking the Doha round which was launched in 2001 in a bid to ease poverty and boost global growth but has already missed several deadlines. The next move to be signaled … is from the U.S., the official said. Mandelson is under pressure not to offer much more on agriculture from EU countries with strong farm lobbies, chief among them France, just as the U.S. government has to contend with a strong U.S. farming lobby. But a spokesman for Mandelson said last week that Brussels could move closer to the demands of developing countries, which want the EU to cut its farm tariffs by an average of 54 percent, on condition others also made concessions. The EU s current offer works out at an average cut of about 39 percent. A spokeswoman for Schwab said Tuesday s meeting was good and productive and touched on other issues including a trans-Atlantic row over subsidies for aircraft makers Boeing and Europe s Airbus. Current U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman, who is due to become U.S. budget director, said last week the EU s new offer was not enough to match U.S. proposals and the bloc had to go beyond the 54 percent cuts sought by the developing countries. But Australian Trade Minister Mark Vaile, who has long urged Europe to give more with its farm offer, on Tuesday, welcomed the move by Brussels and said other key players, the United States and big developing countries, needed to follow suit. The EU has shown some leadership by indicating flexibility on their issue and now obviously there s a need for an indication of flexibility on the other two points of the triangle, he said after several trade ministers met in Paris. His comments were backed by his Egyptian counterpart Rachid Mohamed Rachid, who said Europe had taken a welcome step. The Europeans are showing flexibility and asking others to be flexible which had the support of the group, he said. Negotiators are concerned that an end-of-July deadline for agreement on the round s most important points could be missed. That could mean a delay of several more years because U.S. President George W. Bush loses special powers to approve trade deals in the middle of 2007 and it will take about a year to hammer out all the details of any deal, officials have said.
