MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

EU calls for a trade “compromise and sacrifice”

The European Union is refusing to give up hope for stalled global trade talks and vowed to cut farmers support if other trade partners made similar sacrifices.

With progress on key issues such as agriculture and industrial tariffs proving elusive, the World Trade Organization abandoned plans for a top-level meeting this week.

The message from EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson to United States and emerging economic powers such as India, China and Brazil was direct and clear.

"If the circumstances allow -- if key partners put something worthwhile on the table -- the EU will be prepared to further enhance our current agricultural offer" EU Trade Commissioner Mandelson told a news conference in Brussels. "If the US is similarly willing ... to negotiate further on its agriculture offer that is an important advance. I welcome it," the trade commissioner added. "I will waste no opportunity to test this willingness in the coming period."

Agriculture is one the main stumbling blocks holding back progress in the stalled talks and both Washington and Brussels have long traded accusations that the other is not offering big enough cuts in support to farmers.

Singling out Brazil, China and India, Mandelson also stressed that emerging economic powers had to show they were ready to compromise, especially on reducing their tariffs on industrial products.

"In the case of industrial goods, the bigger developing countries are not giving the rest of us the signal we need that they are serious about eliminating their high industrial tariffs and tariff peaks that currently shut out trade," he said.

However, the EU is not the only negotiator demanding that others move before it budges, meaning that the talks have deadlocked.

While acknowledging that there was "considerable concern" in Brussels that the talks were not progressing on time, Mandelson stressed "we are not going to give up on it now".

In Washington, the US administration is struggling to ward off doubts about its commitment to the talks after US trade Chief Rob Portman was switched to another job. On Tuesday, Portman voiced regret that the deadline for the high-level meeting had been dropped and said that negotiators needed to meet for frank face-to-face talks to get over their differences.

However, in Paris French Trade Minister Christine Lagarde took a dim view about the outlook for the talks and said in an interview published Wednesday that the best thing would simply be to lower ambitions.

She told the International Herald Tribune that negotiators should "think it through a bit harder and a bit longer rather than to jump in a direction that was planned in 2001," when the talks were launched in the Qatari capital of Doha.

"Five years later the factors have changed massively on the European and on the global scene. It's a good reason to slow down."