GENEVA, July 28 (AFP): Top negotiators prepared to turn to fresh proposals today in a bid to nail a new global trade free trade pact despite growing discord and warnings that years of painstaking negotiations could unravel at the last minute.
Squabbles among emerging economies threatened to shatter fragile gains in the fraught quest for an agreement, as top negotiators slogged on into a second week of talks.
Delegates said much remained unresolved after a meeting late Sunday that sought to cement a tentative breakthrough on farming and industrial products.
US Trade Representative Susan Schwab accused emerging economies of delaying an agreement.
Ministers from over 35 key trading nations were due to consult all 153 members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) at a full meeting Monday.
The WTO's chief negotiators on agriculture and industrial goods-respectively ambassadors Crawford Falconer of New Zealand, and Don Stephenson of Canada-were also set to issue new texts that would hopefully serve as the basis for any final agreement, delegates said.
New Zealand's Trade Minister Phil Goff said Sunday that there was "no great animosity" in the talks but conceded that many differences remain.
Optimism had grown after a perceived breakthrough Friday in deadlocked talks on farming and industrial products, followed by further encouraging signs from key players after discussions on the services sector.
But as negotiators began picking through the finer details Sunday, a split opened up among emerging nations, underlining the vast differences in their interests.
India stuck to its hard line of protecting its small-scale farmers, claiming that it had rallied 100 countries to its cause, but other developing economies said they opposed India's stance on the issue.
Commerce Minister Kamal Nath told reporters Sunday night's meeting was "constructive" but said there was still disagreement on the persistent sore points of agricultural import tariffs and sector-specific proposals for industrial goods.
Nath told reporters that "100 countries" had signed a paper backing India's concerns on the so-called special safeguard mechanism (SSM) which would allow developing countries to raise farm tariffs if imports surge.
But an African diplomat told newsmen: "Who are these 100 countries? They (India) are thriving on a pack of lies."
Other developing countries which oppose India's stance include Latin American economies such as Paraguay and Uruguay, much of whose farm exports go to developing states.
"We are not ready to accept a solution that will impose a different balance of rights and obligations than the one we agreed upon in the Uruguay round" of talks in 1994, said Uruguay's ambassador to the WTO, Guillermo Valles Galmes.
Meanwhile, Asian export giant China annoyed other developing countries as it insisted on protecting its rice, cotton and sugar producers, another diplomat told the reporter.
"China is becoming a major problem. It is going back on a lot of its promises," said the diplomat on condition of anonymity, adding that the Asian exporter said it would not lower its tariffs on these three products.
WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell told reporters after Sunday's meeting that SSMs and cotton were among the hot issues going into Monday's talks.
Anything approved by the 35 key countries meeting here would still have to be cleared by all 153 WTO member states.
Meanwhile, a group of banana-producing nations threatened to block the WTO's long-delayed global trade pact if Europe and Latin America press ahead with proposals to shake up banana import tariffs, the minister representing the grouping said yesterday.
"We will block the (WTO) negotiations if our latest counter-proposal is not accepted," Cameroon's Trade Minister Luc Magloire Mbarga Atangana, spokesman for the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) trade grouping, told newsmen.
His comment referred to the ACP's bid to amend an agreement by the European Union to lower banana import tariffs for certain Latin American states. ACP countries fear it will harm the competitiveness of their banana industries.
ACP delegates met with EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson earlier Sunday to push for higher tariffs than those agreed in the bilateral deal between the EU and a grouping of 11 Latin American banana-exporting states.
The ACP said in a statement after the meeting that it had told Mandelson the EU-Latin American proposal was "not acceptable" and offered a "last couter-proposal."
This proposed a cut in tariffs to 117 euros per tonne by 2016 -- from 176 euros per tonne currently-rather than to 114 euros as agreed in Saturday's bilateral deal.
