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Washington: A world trade deal that dramatically opens livestock markets in the European Union, Canada and Japan is within grasp if talks that collapsed last month in Geneva can be revived.
US Trade Representative Susan Schwab hinted at the scope of the deal in a July 30 news conference after nine days of intense negotiations ended in failure.
"We had on the table dramatic market opening potential on the part of developed countries, some modest market opening potential on the part of the emerging markets," Schwab said.
World Trade Director General Pascal Lamy visited India this week and will be in Washington next week to see if it is still possible to rescue the deal. In New Delhi, he said he still believed there was chance to finish negotiations by the end of 2008 despite last month's major setback.
The effort to wrap up the nearly seven-year-old Doha round of world trade talks foundered because of sharp differences between the United States and India over proposed terms of a "special safeguard mechanism" to protect poor farmers in developing countries from import surges.
Washington argued the safeguard demanded by New Delhi would roll back decades of trade liberalisation by allowing tariffs to be hiked above currently bound levels in respond to normal trade growth, rather than an import surge.
US officials have said they see no point in getting Schwab and other ministers together again as long as countries remain at loggerheads on that point.
Still, in the months leading up to the Geneva meeting, negotiators agreed on the outline of a package that - at least in developed countries - met US demands for new farm export opportunities in exchange for farm subsidy cuts. Under the proposal, the EU would designate beef, pork and poultry as "sensitive products" that it could shield from deep tariff cuts.
But in exchange for sheltering those commodities, it would be required to establish "tariff-rate quotas" to let some product enter at zero or very low duties.
"The minimum poultry TRQ would be around 200,000 tonnes. That's huge in terms of world poultry trade," said one private sector agricultural analyst.
Reasonable
A published figure of 290,000 tonnes for a new EU beef TRQ "sounds reasonable", given the size of the market in the economic bloc, the analyst said.
Whatever the exact size, it clearly whetted the appetite of Latin American beef exporters Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay, the analyst said.
Gregg Doud, chief econ-omist with the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, said he could not confirm specific details of the deal hashed out over several months and now at the risk of being lost.
But "we stand to see solid gains if we can ever get this thing to bed. I am extremely comfortable with where we're at in terms of market access", Doud said.
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