Trade Ministers To Meet On Farm Subsidies

By Agence France-Presse Trade ministers from the European Union, the United States, Brazil, India and Australia are to convene June 13 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in a fresh bid to break a deadlock on agriculture that is threatening multilateral trade negotiations, a European source said June 4. The meeting would be held during a gathering of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, he added. A U.S. trade official said after three days of talks in Geneva on agricultural trade that several important political questions remained to be resolved. The 147 members of the World Trade Organization are anxious to reach a "pre-agreement" on trade liberalization negotiations by the end of July. The talks are part of the overall Doha round of negotiations to eliminate global trade barriers that was launched in the Qatari capital in November 2001. The round is scheduled to be concluded by January 2005 but progress has ground to a halt in disputes between developed and developing countries over trade in agricultural products. Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2004