The United States on Monday proposed deep cuts in farm subsidies and the future elimination of farm tariffs in what it said was a bid to unblock world trade talks, which face an end-year deadline for a deal.
US trade chief Rob Portman said his country was willing to accept "some pain" to win an agreement opening the way to a new pact that analysts say could pump billions of dollars into the global economy and help lift millions out of poverty.
The plan, detailed by Portman at a Zurich news conference, was to be put to a meeting of trade ministers in the Swiss business capital later on Monday.
"The US today is taking a risk ... It is stepping forward, and it is my sincere hope that it (the plan) will jump-start the talks," Portman said, referring to stalled negotiations at the Geneva-based World Trade Organisation (WTO).
The initial reaction of other ministers was positive, but some said they needed more detail to assess the plan.
"The European Union will match - and indeed go substantially beyond - the 60 percent cut in the most trade-distorting support proposed by the US," European Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson said in a statement.
But it was unclear whether the EU, which has offered to slash its own "trade-distorting" farm subsidies by 65 percent in return for a 55 percent cut by the United States, would bow to US demands for even deeper reductions.
Mandelson was among 23 trade and farm ministers coming to Zurich on Monday for a meeting of key developed and developing WTO member countries.
The 148-state WTO needs to agree a blueprint for the final stage of its Doha Round at a ministerial conference in Hong Kong in December, but negotiations are snagged on a host of issues, with agriculture the most pressing.
The Round, due to be completed by the end of 2006, aims to lower barriers to trade across the global economy, but poorer countries are demanding deep cuts to farm subsidies they say stop them competing on world markets.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in Geneva voiced strong support for that stance, declaring the poor would only be really helped by "a genuinely free and fair trading system" that would "level the playing field with subsidies removed".
Subsidies, he told reporters, "undermine the agricultural productivity and effectiveness of Third World producers".
Portman, speaking in Zurich, said he proposed steep tariff cuts during the next five years, starting at 55 percent and reaching 90 percent on the highest tariffs in rich countries. He said the United States was prepared to reduce its subsidies by 60 percent but that others such as the EU and Japan, which spend far more, should slash theirs by 80 percent.
The EU currently spends around three times more on farm subsidies than the United States. Portman said he could not take a deal back to Congress that left a gap of more than two times. After a five-year period of adaptation, the drive to lower barriers would resume, with the aim of eliminating all rich-nation trade-distorting subsidies and tariffs by 2023.
"This (proposal) will be a deal-maker or a deal-breaker," Egyptian Trade Minister Rachid Mohammed Rachid told Reuters.
Washington has been under pressure for weeks to come forward with farm proposals, but US negotiators have been loath to move without more progress on how far other countries would cut tariffs to open their markets to American farmers.
"We are waiting to see what the US will do. If there are significant concessions, that could have an impact not just on the farm talks but also on negotiations on industrial goods," said a diplomat from a member of the G20 developing country alliance, ahead of Portman's remarks.
Developing countries such as Brazil and India link opening their markets wider to industrial goods from developed countries to rich nations' readiness to bring down farm barriers.
The European Commission, the EU's Brussels-based executive, has already announced plans to reform its huge farm spending. The reforms take it much of the way towards meeting the demands of exporters such as Brazil and Australia on subsidies.
The Commission came under fire on Monday from 13 EU farm ministers, who accused it in a letter of poor negotiating tactics in the WTO talks.
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