WTO concerned with missing reform deadline

World Trade Organisation (WTO) members yesterday expressed concern at the failure of farm trade negotiators to meet yesterday's deadline for setting guidelines for cuts in agricultural tariffs and subsidies.

Trade diplomats vowed to continue working for a deal, if possible before September's critical ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mexico, which is due to take stock of progress in the broader Doha global trade talks.

However, they acknowledged there could be adverse repercussions on other areas of the talks, calling into question the round's ambitious three-year timetable that envisages completion in December 2004.

Mr Robert Zoellick, US trade representative, and Ms Anne Veneman, agriculture secretary, said they were "disappointed but not surprised" by the impasse. They called on the European Union to agree rapidly proposed reforms to its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), saying the Doha talks still offered "win-win" possibilities for progress.

Mr David Spencer, WTO ambassador for Australia, co-ordinator of the Cairns group of free-trading agricultural exporters, said: "This is a serious setback. This inability to make progress will have implications for other areas of the negotiations and could constitute a serious setback for our objective of concluding the negotiations by 2005."

He singled out the EU and Japan for blame, saying their farm trade reform proposals fell far short of the objectives set for the talks at their launch in Doha in November 2001.

However, Mr Franz Fischler, EU agriculture commissioner, defended the EU position and insisted more work was needed to improve the draft proposals in Geneva. The EU occupied a "middle way between extreme positions", he insisted.

"More important than a deadline is real effort to inject new dynamism into the negotiations, to keep working to narrow existing gaps," he said in London.

European Commission officials in Brussels said the EU would now redouble efforts to forge a common position before the Cancun meeting.

Missing the deadline was "not the end of the world and not the end of the Doha development round. There is no need to panic," one official said. WTO farm trade negotiators are due to meet again in June and July.