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US aims to cushion EU farm export subsidy decision

US officials said they would try to broker a trade-off between developing countries and the European Union over farming and the environment to help clinch a deal on Tuesday at the World Trade Organisation meeting in Doha.

They said they hoped to persuade African and Southeast Asian nations to give the EU enough ground on environmental issues so Brussels would have political cover to move toward the elimination of agricultural export subsidies.

With the WTO meeting to launch world trade talks now in its final day, a US trade official said his country would focus its remaining efforts on building support in the developing world for a limited version of the EU's environmental agenda.

The EU came to the meeting pushing an ambitious agenda calling for negotiations on national competition policy, foreign direct investment rules and environmental concerns.

Developing countries have been put off by the list. Many fear making new commitments they might struggle to implement. They also worry environmental talks could lead to new restrictions on their exports.

"To me, that's the big challenge and I don't know how it's going to come out," a US official said, referring to the gap between developing countries and the EU on those issues.

Brussels, for its part, has been on the defensive in discussions on agriculture as other countries have united around a text calling for negotiations on reducing farm export subsidies "with a view to phasing out".

The EU, which spends more on agricultural export subsidies than anyone else, has objected to that language, saying it would preordain the outcome of negotiations.

Its efforts to change the language have been strongly resisted by other countries, which say the entire agriculture text could collapse if it is opened for revisions.

NOT WRITTEN IN STONE

Despite the EU's concern, US officials argue the text would merely set the stage for negotiations.

"Any fair reading of that text would indicate that it doesn't predetermine an outcome," Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said.

A new version of the agriculture text circulated to WTO members on Tuesday leaves the question of how to handle export subsidies open for a final decision by the membership.

In the anticipation most countries would reject any softening of the language, US officials were advocating a modest version of the EU environmental agenda to give EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy a trophy to take back to Brussels.

The US proposals include negotiations aimed at clarifying the relationships between international environment agreements and WTO rules, as well as talks aimed at reducing fishery subsidies and tariffs on environmental goods and services.

On other issues, the US official noted that Indian Commerce Minister Murasoli Maran still objected to a number of proposed terms for the launch of new trade talks.

The US delegation would continue to work with Maran, but in the end he would have to choose whether to support what other countries had agreed on, the US official said.

The United States could not accept one of India's principal demands -- the acceleration of the current schedule of increasing textile import quotas -- as a down-payment for starting new world trade talks, the official said.

Any change in textile quota commitments agreed in 1994 could only come through new negotiations, the official said.

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