US President George W. Bush should use this week's meeting with Asia-Pacific leaders to offer cuts in US farm subsidies to unlock global trade talks, Australia and the European Union said on Tuesday.
World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations resumed in Geneva this week to discuss draft texts aimed at ending the deadlock between developed and developing nations, over protection for agriculture and manufactured goods.
Australia, which is hosting the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) forum summit, expects Bush and fellow Apec leaders to issue a strong statement in support of an eventual WTO deal to boost global trade and lift millions out of poverty.
"We would like to see the US make a positive step towards reducing its farm support and that would send a very powerful signal to the rest of the world," Australian Trade Minister Warren Truss said.
Poorer nations led by India and Brazil have faulted Europe and the United States for not offering enough in the nearly six-year-old talks in exchange for opening up their markets.
Truss told reporters Apec, which accounts for nearly half of world trade, could make a difference. "We have a key role to provide impetus and encouragement to the negotiators," he said. "We also need to move forward on all fronts together. It's unreasonable to expect one country to do all the heavy lifting." European Union trade chief Peter Mandelson also said the United States could help break the impasse and that the Apec meetings, which he is not attending, were very important.
"We are in a stalemate on this and I believe that the United States holds the key to unlocking it, although it is not only the United States that has got to make moves if we are going to bring this eventually to a successful conclusion," Mandelson said in an interview with BBC television.
Apec trade ministers are meeting on September 5-6 in Sydney ahead of a September 8-9 summit in the same city. The leaders will pledge to ensure that the moribund Doha round of global trade talks "enter their final phase this year", according to a draft statement obtained by Reuters.
Trade experts say the talks risk years of delay without a deal by end of 2007, given the US presidential elections in 2008 followed by elections in India in 2009.
Trade diplomats returned to the negotiating table in Geneva on Monday. New Zealand Ambassador Crawford Falconer, who chairs the World Trade Organisation's (WTO) agriculture negotiations, said he was encouraged by the no-nonsense tone.
Arguments over the size of cuts to farming subsidies and import tariffs, especially in rich nations such as the United States and France, are among the toughest challenges in the way of a WTO deal on agriculture, industrial goods and services.
In July, WTO diplomats proposed compromises for a deal, including a cut in a ceiling for US farm subsidies to between $13 and $16.4 billion a year, below previous US offers. Mandelson told the BBC that the United States had to pitch its offer within the range. "I think they can get away with it politically. But if they don't, I think I can only see the stalemate continuing and the talks facing collapse," he said.