GENEVA, 14 August 2003 — The European Union and the United States have agreed on a joint position for WTO farm reform talks that could breathe new life into stalled global trade negotiations, trade sources said yesterday. The plan, which was to be presented to other World Trade Organization members later yesterday, is the first serious move to negotiate on agriculture in three years, according to one trade source.

It’s “a significant attempt at compromise,” the source commented. It comes less than a month before ministers from the 146 member states of the WTO are due to hold crunch talks in Mexico to review progress so far on the Doha round of free-trade talks.

Negotiations have made little progress since their November 2001 launch in the Qatari capital with a string of missed deadlines amid stubborn differences over key issues. Agriculture is considered essential to the success of the overall Doha round, which also covers trade in services such as telecommunications and market access for industrial products. The Doha round is due to wrap up by Jan. 1, 2005.

The EU-US compromise plan, which would need backing from the WTO’s full membership, covers all aspects of farm trade including the three areas that have been hardest to crack: market access, domestic support for farmers and export subsidies.

“They reached in principle agreement on what to have to go in the text,” the EU’s ambassador to the WTO Carlo Trojan told reporters earlier yesterday.

The European Commission said in Brussels that the text was not detailed, adding: “This is a framework text with a little detail in it”. Until now the United States, along with big agricultural exporting countries such as Australia and Argentina, and the European Union have been at loggerheads over the approach for cutting state aid to farmers and reducing tariffs in agricultural trade.

The US and the 18-nation Cairns Group are impatient for radical liberalization of global farming markets. But the EU and Japan have advocated a slower and more cautious approach, which would take into account the role of farming in issues such as environmental protection and food security.

A draft outline for the negotiations’ parameters drawn up by the chairman of the talks early in the year was roundly condemned as being too ambitious by some countries, while others tarred it as lacking in ambition. The EU and US announced the bilateral effort to revive the WTO farm talks at a late July meeting in Montreal, Canada, ahead of the Sept. 10-14 Cancun conference.

The joint plan does not stipulate that all export subsidies should be eliminated, in a move which can be seen as a victory for the EU, according to a trade source. But it does call for their elimination on products of special interest to developing countries, according to a copy of the text. Remaining products should see reductions.

A limit is also called for on certain types of domestic support for farmers that currently are unlimited. For reducing tariffs, the paper proposes a compromise formula that “blends” steeper cuts on higher tariffs with a less drastic reduction formula used in previous trade negotiations.

In Brussels, a spokesman for the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said that the plan was a framework text that contained little detail. “It does not contain figures,” spokesman Eric Mamer told the Commission’s daily briefing. Some trade envoys said the EU-US plan could backfire if it did not satisfy demands from exporters and Third World countries for a real shake-up in world farm trade.

WTO decisions are taken by consensus and many states have said that without progress in the farm talks there is no chance of deals in other area of the Doha Round, which aims to lower barriers to business across the global economy.