GENEVA, June 28 (Agencies): Governments negotiating a global trade treaty Friday backed what trade experts said was a "make-or-break" test of the seven-year drive to cut tariffs and subsidies that pinch exporters and constrain growth.
World Trade Organisation (WTO) Director-General Pascal Lamy has called for ministers to meet from July 21 to seek agreement in farming and manufacturing-the two toughest areas-to try to reach a full deal on the so-called Doha round in 2008.
The 152 members of the WTO's trade negotiating committee backed Lamy's move.
"It's clearly risky," said David Woods, a trade analyst and former WTO spokesman, who warned that diplomats in Geneva needed to overcome huge obstacles in their often-complex negotiations before ministers could be expected to reach any agreement.
"Either they make a tremendous amount of progress in the next few weeks or they do not. If that progress is not forthcoming there is no way this deal can be done in four or five days," Woods said, referring to the ministerial meeting.
Former WTO services director David Hartridge said Lamy's decision was "a brave but necessary thing to do."
But he said it would be hard to broker a deal to open markets in goods ranging from coffee to cotton and cars unless diplomats could resolve stark differences in technical areas of the talks.
"There are still a lot of outstanding points, and you can't put too many such matters to a short meeting of ministers," said Hartridge, now a trade adviser for the law firm White and Case.
"The chance of a successful ministerial depends very much on the ability of senior officials to dispose of some of the outstanding issues before ministers come to Geneva," he said.
New Zealand ambassador Crawford Falconer, who chairs the agriculture talks, said he would aim to release a revised negotiating text early in the week of July 7.
"The existing text is something that ministers could deal with, but a sensible person would prefer that they have a simpler set of decisions to deal with," Falconer told journalists on the sidelines of a closed-door plenary Friday.
Industrial talks chairman Don Stephenson told the meeting he also needed to see new offers before he could revise his text.
Economists believe a deal in the Doha round, launched in the Qatari capital in November 2001, would spur billions of dollars of cross-border commercial flows and avert scores of disputes over the use of tariffs, subsidies, and sanctions.
It could also lead to job losses in economic sectors that are now protected from international competition by tariffs and subsidies which would be cut or capped under an accord.
Lamy, a Frenchman and ex-European Union trade chief, wants to reach a Doha deal this year, before the US presidential election, giving a shot in the arm for the troubled global economy.
But with US President George W Bush lacking authority from Congress to approve a deal, diplomats said Washington's ability to negotiate meaningfully was in doubt.
Meanwhile, France said Friday it will hold a special meeting of European ministers to discuss the EU position on global commerce as the WTO seeks to conclude a long-deadlocked deal.
"France will organise between 14 and 20 July an extraordinary meeting of European ministers of foreign affairs... to quickly deal with European positions regarding the WTO," said Europe Minister Jean-Pierre Jouyet.
"Europe cannot sit back and do nothing about the WTO, which was a major cause of trouble in Ireland, with agriculture, as it is France," he told French radio.
Jouyet, whose country takes over the rotating EU presidency on July 1, was referring to Irish voters' rejection this month of the European Union's Lisbon Treaty, which plunged the 27-nation bloc into crisis.
On Wednesday, WTO head Pascal Lamy invited ministers from 30 leading countries to a meeting in Geneva on July 21 to try to broker a final deal in the so-called Doha round of trade talks.
The Doha round, aimed at a creating a new global agreement to remove barriers to trade and spur cross-border exchanges, has been deadlocked because of disagreements between the US and Europe, and developed and developing countries.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy last week however ruled out a free-trade deal at the WTO after Ireland's rejection of the EU treaty.
