By ELIZABETH OLSON New York Times
GENEVA, June 25 - While huge diplomatic momentum is gathering behind the idea of a new round of global trade talks, fundamental differences between rich and poor nations and the United States and its trading partners over what should be on the agenda are clouding the talks before they can begin, just as they did in Seattle in December 1999.
After being mired for a year after the Seattle debacle, the trade-round juggernaut began to gather speed again early in the year when Pascal Lamy, the European Union's trade commissioner, spoke strongly in favor of starting a new round at the World Trade Organization's next ministerial meeting, to be held in November in Doha, Qatar. In May, President Bush declared free trade a "moral imperative," and the United States trade representative, Robert Zoellick, promoted the idea on a subsequent swing through Europe. Trade ministers from Asian nations added their voices, saying a new round is urgently needed to head off the protectionism that often flares when economies slow down. Last month, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development also called for a trade round.
For the Doha meeting to succeed, the trade group must find enough common ground among its members to hammer out a workable agenda before it starts. To that end, trade officials have gathered at the organization's headquarters in Geneva in recent weeks, and early soundings have found deep disagreements.
"It's obvious there is a large gap in views," one European envoy said. The divisions follow a pattern that was largely evident before the failed Seattle meeting. The European Union leads a group of nations favoring a broad mandate for the talks to make trade concessions more palatable domestically. They want to include food safety, environmental standards, foreign direct investment and national competition policy in the talks.
The United States, which has yet to state its position unequivocally, is believed to want to sidestep fractious subjects like antidumping rules and limits on import surges. In May, Mr. Zoellick said Washington favored a "focused agenda" concentrating on better access for services and agricultural and industrial goods.
So far, the American and European representatives here have played down differences in public, most recently at a joint news conference today, where both sides used the term "ambitious agenda" for their positions. But President Bush's steps to curb steel imports and a belief that he wants to avoid signing any agreements that would foreclose such actions have irritated some United States trading partners.
But the developing countries that make up the bulk of the trade organization want limits on such antidumping actions to be high on the agenda. Led by India and Pakistan, the developing nations have spoken about opposing a new trade round because they say their interests received inadequate attention at the last set of talks, the Uruguay Round, which ended in 1994.
"We are not ready for it," India's trade envoy, Srinivasan Narayanan, said of plans to start a new round at Doha. "We'll lose more than we'll gain."
The person who is trying to reconcile these competing views is Mike Moore, head of the World Trade Organization, who has been trying to build momentum for a new round since the Seattle meeting fell apart a few months into his term. Mr. Moore wants an outline agenda in place by the end of July, so that negotiations will not stretch into the 11th hour as they did at Seattle.
Mindful of the stakes, a group of high-level trade officials traveled to Geneva from their home capitals today to try to move the process forward. "If we fail for a second time, it will contaminate the atmosphere and create the idea that we can't take the hard decisions," Japan's trade negotiator, Yoichi Suzuki, said last week. Japan is generally aligned with Europe in the talks.
Some diplomats believe that most of the bare-minimum ingredients of a new round are already in place - the talks on agriculture and on services, including banking, insurance and telecommunications, that were agreed to during the Uruguay Round. If one or two more areas, like tariffs on nonfarm products or trade facilitation, can be added, the talks could be labeled a new round.
Looming in the background is the volatile issue of linking labor standards to trade. Developing countries bitterly oppose making labor standards a matter for the trade organization, which can authorize sanctions. "For them, this is not a line in the sand, it is a canyon," Mr. Moore said. But American and European labor unions have pressed hard for a system that can impose real consequences on countries that fail to protect workers and the environment, and street protests over the issue helped sink the Seattle talks.:
