by
GUY DE JONQUIERES and FRANCES WILLIAMS
The final countdown starts today for efforts to revive the Doha global trade round, after two days of talks in which World Trade Organisation members have made only limited progress in resolving their most stubborn differences.
Shotaro Oshima, chairman of the WTO general council, has promised to issue overnight a revised version of the draft agreement on a framework for continuing the negotiations.
He ruled out further substantial amendments to the new text and said the talks must end by midnight tomorrow. Officials said, however, that the positions of leading trade powers needed to shift substantially for the text to command the unanimous support needed of the WTO's 147 members.
Although the talks have produced outline compromises on some contentious issues, agreement on a final package hinges on the issue of farm trade.
The toughest remaining challenge is to narrow divisions over how far countries would be allowed to continue protecting "sensitive" agricultural products, such as rice in Japan. Supachai Panitchpakdi, WTO director-general, said yesterday that the issue was the main potential "deal-breaker".
The US and large agricultural exporters such as Brazil and Australia want decisive action to open markets. However, the European Union is resisting deep cuts in its trade barriers, while wealthy net food importing countries including Japan, Switzerland and Norway say liberalisation proposals on the table go too far.
Meanwhile, many developing countries object that the proposals offer them vaguer assurances on their right to shelter "sensitive" products than they do to wealthy nations and are demanding more specific guarantees.
Another serious disagreement this week has been over developing countries' objections to a proposal that they claim would enable the US to continue paying its farmers billions of dollars of trade-distorting subsidies.
Some diplomats say this week's talks may only succeed if WTO members water down further the language of the planned agreement, which is already less ambitious than the accord that WTO ministers had hoped to reach at their failed meeting in Cancun last September.
However, other diplomats say that while further dilution might satisfy some governments, it would be unacceptable to others.Financial Times
