Miami Herald | By Jane Bussey | Sept. 12, 2003
Fissures in the world trade consensus threatened to widen into a chasm at the world trade talks here Thursday as developing countries and industrialized ones hardened their positions on farm subsidies.
The standoff between the United States and the European Union, on one hand, and a group of developing countries led by Brazil, on the other, jeopardizes the outcome of the conference of ministers of the World Trade Organization.
Some eight miles from the site of the trade talks, meanwhile, at the bridge between the town of Cancun and the hotel zone, police and protesters staged their own confrontation. But while the demonstrators threw rocks, bottles and coconuts as the police, who had fortified barricades during the night, the clashes ended with little more than a standoff between the two sides.
By Sunday, the WTO, having grown to 148 members with the addition of Cambodia and Nepal, is to have thrashed out the specific approach -- timetable, deadlines and framework -- for finishing up an ambitious agenda of lowering tariffs and eliminating other trade barriers by 2005.
But as the European Union admonished the so-called Group of 21 -- led by Brazil, China and India -- against false expectations, both the Europeans and the Americans questioned whether the new negotiating bloc could hold.
''It is really unclear to us what is the unifying principle there among those countries,'' said Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Peter Allgeier, who called on other countries to ''bridge differences.''
The gap was growing, nonetheless, and despite reports from observers that the Europeans and Americans were attempting to prevent new additions to the group, it went at this meeting alone from 20 to 21 members with the addition of Egypt.
The main demand of the Group of 21 is that Europe and the United States end subsidies that allow agricultural producers to dump -- or sell below cost -- farm products into poorer countries and, in so doing, put local farmers out of business.
''We had to have a priority, which was agricultural dumping,'' said Pedro Carmago, the former agricultural trade negotiator for Brazil and an observer at these talks. ''Export dumping is difficult to defend. We have all the non-government organizations on our side -- both American and European.''
The Group of 21's stance has found enormous resonance among the dozens of small farm, consumer and development groups at the talks.
But Florida sugar growers issued a statement questioning Brazils position, accusing South America's largest nation of having its own subsidies that allow it to dump its sugar in the U.S. market.
Knight-Ridder special correspondent Janet Schwartz contributed to this story.Miami Herald:
