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WASHINGTON : World Trade Organisation chief Pascal Lamy and top US trade negotiator Susan Schwab were to meet in Washington in an effort to restart the Doha Round of negotiations, a US official said Thursday.
Lamy and the US trade representative were to have a private dinner late Thursday and hold further talks Friday morning, USTR spokeswoman Gretchen Hamel told AFP.
Schwab, in an interview with Inside US Trade published Wednesday, said the United States supports holding talks with senior officials from a small number of countries in September to explore the possibility of restarting the Doha Round.
Such an effort would help preserve the progress achieved during a failed July ministerial meeting and prevent its further erosion, she said.
"We need to come to the table in September at the senior official level to test the seriousness of going forward, to bring forward new ideas to overcome some of the problems that we encountered in July that we were not able to overcome at that time, and quite frankly to stop the deterioration and the erosion of what was on the table in July," Schwab was quoted as saying.
In the interview, Schwab expressed hope that the September meeting could "clear the way, conceivably, for another round of ministerial engagement."
The US trade negotiator suggested talks could start in a "small group" of senior officials, and that the group did not necessarily have to be the same that was the core of the negotiations during the July ministerial.
That group was comprised of the US, European Union, Brazil, India, China, Australia and Japan.
Schwab said she would be talking with the WTO director general this week about the senior officials meeting in September, which she said should involve "those countries in leadership roles."
Brazil has been making efforts in recent weeks to revive the WTO negotiations. India, too, has signaled it is willing to return to Geneva during a recent visit by Lamy aimed at restarting negotiations.
World Bank president Robert Zoellick this week suggested limits for a proposed agricultural safeguard that torpedoed the ministerial talks, saying the world's poor need the successful completion of the seven-year-old Doha Round.
The Geneva meeting collapsed in late July in an impasse between India and the US over a special safeguard mechanism that would allow nations to impose a special tariff on agricultural goods if imports surge or prices fall.
The US rejected Indian proposals that developing nations should be allowed to boost duties by an additional 25 percent on farm products if imports surged by 15 percent.
Washington insisted extra duties should be allowed only if imports rose by 40 percent.
- AFP /ls
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