New York Times / By ELIZABETH OLSON
GENEVA, April 3 -- After a year of proposals and counterproposals, the member nations of the World Trade Organization have finally agreed to begin negotiations in May on freer trade in agricultural goods. An agenda for the talks was approved late last week.
But there was broad skepticism that talks on so contentious an issue could succeed without a whole new round of comprehensive trade negotiations being convened.
The talks to be held in May "are not going to be easy," said Mike Moore, the organization's director general. But the fact that they will be held at all shows "a widespread commitment to continue to reform agricultural trade," he said.
"The interests of everyone, from subsistence cultivators and herdsmen in developing countries to modern farms in the developed nations, are being pushed in these talks," he said.
Under the agenda agreement, the talks will cover a wide range of technical issues like export subsidies and credits, as well as broader questions like assuring the safety of food supplies and preserving rural life, which the recent mad cow and foot-and-mouth crises have brought to center stage in recent months.
Agriculture remains one sector in which trade is most likely to be impeded by a bewildering array of tariffs, subsidies, credits, standards and quotas. The European Union's farm policies have frequently caused friction with big agricultural exporters like Australia and the United States.
Officials of the union are eager to start the talks, and they have shown willingness to consider big changes in policy. But decades-old disputes over farm subsidies may once again prove insurmountable, trade experts said.
Differences on this and other topics helped stall efforts to begin a new global trade round in Seattle in December 1999. The agriculture talks that are to convene in May are unfinished business from the previous negotiations, known as the Uruguay round, and are expected to last a year.
Discussions on liberalizing trade in services like banking, insurance, shipping and telecommunications are also still pending from Uruguay. But here, too, many diplomats see little hope for major progress without convening a new umbrella round.
In single-sector talks, the diplomats say, there are fewer opportunities for countries to swap concessions in one area to win them in another. Barriers like the anti-dumping rules of the United States that are popular at home can become politically impregnable in such talks.
Still, developing countries, many of which are dissatisfied with the results of the Uruguay round, are resisting a new round. Mr. Moore has said he will decide by the end of July whether to try starting a new round at the ministerial meeting set for Doha, Qatar, in November.
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