The world's leading trading powers are this week to mount yet another bid to salvage WTO negotiations aimed at reducing barriers to global commerce that have gone nowhere for the past six years.
Major players from the World Trade Organisation at meetings in Paris and Brussels will try to narrow differences, notably on trade in agricultural products, that have blocked progress in the Doha Development Round, launched with great fanfare in the Qatari capital in 2001.
Trade or finance ministers from 30 leading industrialised nations will convene here Wednesday for trade talks during the annual gathering of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
On Thursday the action moves to Brussels where the four principal parties to the talks, the European Union, the United States, India and Brazil, will hold a two-day session.
The talks will bring together EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, US Trade Representative Susan Schwab, Indian Trade Minister Kamal Nath and Brazlian Finance Minister Celso Amorim.
With the Doha round formally suspended since July 2006, Crawford Falconer, the WTO's chief agriculture negotiator, in late April sought to provoke some forward movement by confronting the parties with a new set of figures.
He proposed that the United States reduce its official support to farmers to an amount less than 19 billion dollars (14 billion euros) a year and that the European cut its highest import duties on agricultural produce by 65 to 80 percent.
While WTO Director General Pascal Lamy has detected movement toward consensus, Eric Vergnaud, an analyst with the bank BNP Paribas warned that "an agreement will be hard to achieve." Falconer's initiative, according to Lionel Fontagne of the economic research group Cepii, is "valuable because it clearly sets out the key problems but everything depends on the willingness of each of the parties to be flexible."
"The Americans must make an effort on their domestic support for agriculture but they have a big problem with Congress," where the US farm lobby is a powerful force. "The Europeans have to move on customs duties but they have a problem with the mandate given to Peter Mandelson," notably as certain EU members fear he might give too much away.
Emerging market counties, according to analysts, must for their part agree to make their markets more accessible to products from industrialised nations.
Negotiators are under pressure from a key date, June 30, when President George W. Bush's "fast track" trade authority expires. Under current legislation, the US Congress is entitled to approve or reject trade deals signed by the administration but is unable to amend them.
Without "fast track," a Doha Round trade liberalisation accord approved by the US administration could be in danger of being picked apart - and neutralised - by members of Congress serving specialised constituencies.
The United States, the EU, India and Brazil have pledged to step up the pace of their encounters to strike a deal by mid-June, with further meetings planned for London on June 10 and from June 14 to 19 at a location yet to be determined.