WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States threatened to go it alone by seeking one-on-one trade pacts if the world fails to overcome a logjam and secure a free-trade deal by January 1, 2005.
World Trade Organization ministers are preparing for a September 10 to 14 conference in Cancun, Mexico to salvage the negotiations, bogged down by deep-seated disputes, especially over farm trade.
US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick said Washington was prepared to pursue its own free-trade agenda if the WTO proved unable to do its job.
President George W. Bush was committed to free trade, he said, noting that Bush had signed legislation Wednesday to implement free trade deals with Chile and Singapore.
"We will find countries that want to open up markets with the United States," Zoellick told a conference here.
"I hope they will be in the WTO. But if they are not, we are not stopping. We are moving with the countries that are willing to go," he warned.
His opposite number in Europe, European Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy, speaking via satellite, said a failure to complete the agenda, launched in Doha, Qatar in November 2001, would have economic repercussions.
"Cancun is a mid-term review and the big decision down there is whether or not we have done 50 percent of the road so that we are we confident enough that with a big push we can do the remaining 50 percent by the end of next year," Lamy said.
"If we say we can do that and we do it, it is terribly good news for the world economy," he said.
But "if we say we can do it and we cannot do it at the end of the day, it is going to be bad news for the world economy and for the world trading system."
Zoellick and Lamy broadly agreed that goals in Cancun would be:
-- To develop a framework for negotiations in agriculture, goods and services, without putting in the exact figures for subsidies or tariff cuts.
-- To decide whether to discuss new topics such as investment, transparency in government procurement, and competition.
-- To discuss the provision of special and differential treatment for the developing world, and to review how the existing world trade rules are being implemented.
US-European Union cooperation was improving the outlook for Cancun, Zoellick said.
"Developing countries have a very important say in this process. At the same time, they have very diverse interests," he added.
"One of the real challenges here for the WTO -- and you will see it in this meeting -- is how do they see their interests as individual countries but also in promoting the WTO?," he asked.
"Will it be a place for solutions? And will there be a sense of mutual responsibility?"
Speeches alone would not be enough to push the negotiations forward, Zoellick said, and some ministers from the developing countries would have to take a key role.
Zoellick also cast an apparent barb at Japan for failing to play a leadership role in the talks.
"There are other developed countres -- one in particular that has grown heavily on the trading system -- that never plays this role," he said, without actually naming the country.
The United States and Europe had their differences, Zoellick said. "But we are in a position of trying to exert some leadership and I wish that some of the other major -- or one other particular major developed country -- would also do that as well."
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