No Breakthroughs On Doha, But U.S. Officials Still Hopeful

U.S. trade negotiators appear to have made no breakthroughs in the bilateral meetings leading up to the formal World Trade Organization's Doha round negotiating sessions scheduled to begin today in Geneva, but the United States still hopes to make progress this weekend, two senior U.S. trade officials indicated in briefings late Thursday.

Negotiators on agriculture and manufacturing have had "a good couple days," gotten some good responses and "hope to find a way to draw [other negotiators] out of their shells" to make bigger offers to reduce tariffs, one senior official said.

But while WTO Director General Pascal Lamy has emphasized the meetings are crucial, the U.S. officials said the real deadlines are this summer and the end of the year rather than this week.

"We've got to get something signed, sealed and packaged up in a nice little bundle by the end of the year," one U.S. official told Geneva-based reporters. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a transcript of that briefing.

Both officials said that Lamy's "20-20-20" proposal on agriculture and manufacturing was unsatisfactory. Lamy suggested Wednesday that one way to move the stalled talks might be to accept Group of 20 countries' proposal on reducing agricultural tariffs by 54 percent, accept a 20 percent maximum industrial tariff and agree to a $20 billion limit on trade-distorting agricultural subsidies in the United States.

If negotiators agreed to a 20 percent maximum industrial tariff "half the applied tariffs in Brazil and India would go uncut" and cuts in the remaining tariffs would average only 10 percent, one official said.

U.S. officials say the maximum tariff in developing countries should be 15 percent, and "every point over that decreases the real gains in advanced developing country markets," the official said.

Lamy's proposal that U.S. subsidies be limited to less than $20 billion "is a distraction," another official said. Under the Uruguay Round of negotiations that produced the current trade framework, the United States is limited to $19 billion in the most trade-distorting subsidies. It has offered to cut those subsidies by 60 percent to $7.6 billion.

In addition, the United States has offered to limit its currently unlimited partially trade-distorting subsidies to $4.8 billion and to limit two categories of smaller "de minimus" subsidies to $4.8 billion each. That offer would give the United States a total limit of $22 billion, the U.S. official said. Under current WTO rules, subsidies that amount to less than 5 percent of the value of production are not counted against a country's cap.