France has called a high-level EU meeting next week to vent its fears that Europe is offering too much on agriculture in order to secure a global trade deal, French officials said on Friday.
France, the staunchest defender of the Europe Union's generous subsidies to farmers and its high tariffs on imports of farm produce from outside the bloc, will spell out its concern at the meeting of foreign and trade ministers on Tuesday.
The European Commission, which negotiates trade on behalf of the bloc, is also under pressure from the United States and developing countries to open EU agricultural markets further when the 148 member countries of the WTO meet in December.
French President Jacques Chirac this week complained to European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso that Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson had not been transparent about his plans to secure a World Trade Organisation deal.
French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said on Friday he had asked British counterpart Jack Straw to call the meeting to discuss trade as well as Europe's response to the detection of a strain of bird flu in Turkey that can be fatal for humans.
Britain holds the EU presidency and a British spokesman confirmed the meeting would take place in Luxembourg.
"(Mandelson) went much further than we wanted. The ministers want to exercise their political control, to tell them off a bit and bring them to order," a French diplomatic source said.
Mandelson said he was happy to brief ministers on the talks.
"I support the calling of this meeting as a welcome opportunity to continue to provide transparency to member states and to reassure them that the conduct of the negotiations by the Commission is within the mandate," he said in a statement.
As well as Chirac's letter to Barroso, French Trade Minister Christine Lagarde this week accused Mandelson of overstepping his mandate with the EU's latest offer on agriculture.
Lagarde, in an interview published on Friday in the French newspaper Les Echos, said France was not alone, recalling a recent letter expressing concern about the trade round which she said was signed by ministers from 14 EU countries.
"That clearly shows that France is not isolated," she said.
The EU has so far offered a 70 percent reduction in trade-distorting farm subsidies, largely in line with a reform already agreed by member states, plus cuts of at least 50 percent in its highest farm import tariffs and tighter controls on the amount of "sensitive" goods it most protects.
The United States has said Brussels did not go far enough.
Without a farm deal, developing economies like Brazil could refuse to open their big markets in industrial goods and services.
Mandelson, his US counterpart Rob Portman and other trade ministers are due to resume talks in Geneva on Wednesday and Thursday to seek a blueprint for the WTO meeting in December.
That meeting in Hong Kong is seen as a last chance for a deal to free up world trade under a current WTO round of talks.
The aid agency Oxfam, which campaigns on behalf of some of the world's poorest countries, said it was concerned that the stand-off over agriculture would in the end benefit only rich countries.
"These talks were meant to deliver for development," Celine Charveriat, head of Oxfam's Make Trade Fair Campaign. "It's not good enough for the big players to strike a last-minute deal that suits them but leaves poor countries out in the cold."
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