GENEVA – WTO members called a halt to more than five years of commerce liberalization talks Monday as differences over farm aid proved unbridgeable.
Pascal Lamy, director-general of the World Trade Organization, said a deal billed as a recipe for lifting millions of people worldwide out of poverty would not be reached by the end of the year and there was no new timetable for completing the discussion.
“We are in dire straits,” Lamy said after six of the WTO’s most powerful members failed to agree on steps toward liberalizing trade in farm and manufactured goods. He said he did not intend to propose any new deadlines or a date for negotiators to meet again.
The 25-nation European Union criticized U.S. intransigence over agricultural subsidies for the breakdown, while the United States blamed Brazil and India for being inflexible on cutting barriers to industrial imports and the EU for refusing to make deeper cuts in its farm import tariffs.
Last week, presidents and prime ministers from the Group of Eight leading industrialized countries called a new trade deal a top priority. But that promise did not translate into real negotiating action during two days of meetings facilitated by Lamy between Australia, Brazil, the EU, India, Japan and the United States.
Now the whole process of agreeing to a binding treaty may have to be put on ice until after U.S. presidential elections in 2008 because President Bush’s “fast-track” authority to strike trade deals expires next year.
Without that measure, which requires an up or down vote without amendments, it would be much harder to gain congressional approval in the U.S., the world’s largest trading nation.
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