By Robert Evans
GENEVA, March 23 (Reuters) - Long-awaited World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks on removing barriers to freer global farm trade were launched on Thursday but diplomats said they could drag on for years.
The negotiations formally got under way after a row -- setting proponents of fast and radical reforms against powers preferring a "softly, softly" approach -- over who should chair them for the first year was temporarily shelved.
In opening speeches, the two camps -- the 18-nation Australian-led Cairns Group and what some critical diplomats call the "rejectionist front" led by the European Union and Japan -- set out views on how the talks should proceed.
"There was nothing there that gives us much hope that this is a process that can be completed quickly," said one envoy whose country keeps a distance from both sides.
CALL FOR SET TIME-FRAME
Australia, speaking for its Cairns partners who include key farm produce-exporters among developed and developing countries, insisted the negotiations should have a set time-frame and have no firm tie-up to a wider trade liberalisation round.
But Japan, the world's third-largest trading power, argued that the farm talks could only be concluded as part of an overall package covering other areas of trade in a new round -- agreement on which diplomats say is a long way off.
And the European Union, supported by Japan, said the farm talks would have to include consideration of the "multi- functionality" of agriculture -- a stance which helped wreck a WTO ministerial meeting in Seattle in December.
The term refers to agriculture's role in environmental protection, preserving rural life and food security -- a concept critics say is a cover for ensuring that the countries preaching it can keep subsidies for as long as possible.
The United States, whose farmers are also keen to prise open the heavily subsidised EU market for agricultural goods and generally lines up with Cairns, said deadlines had to be set for the negotiations to avoid "needless procedural wrangling."
The first session of the talks, to continue on Friday, was chaired by New Zealand's ambassador Roger Farrell after the EU objected to giving the job for the year to Brazil's respected envoy Celso Amorim because his country is in the Cairns Group.
After hours of backstage negotiations, both camps agreed to let Farrell -- outgoing chairman of the WTO's Goods Council which has oversight of farm issues -- do the job for two days to avoid postponement of the talks' launch.
Ironically, New Zealand is itself highly active in the Cairns Group -- which also includes Canada, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Thailand.
The start of new agricultural talks this year, together with negotiations on wider freedoms for global trade in services, were agreed in 1994 at the end of the 1986-94 Uruguay Round which gave a huge boost to freer world trade.
A new round -- into which these negotiations could have been absorbed -- was to have been agreed in Seattle.
But the basic differences between the produce exporters in Cairns, backed by the United States, and the EU, Japan and their allies -- Switzerland, Norway and South Korea who also grant their farmers heavy subsidies -- helped derail the project.:
