Green light for world trade talks

Bleary-eyed delegates at the World Trade Organisation conference today agreed to start a new round of much anticipated talks to free up global commerce after the lone dissident - India - agreed to abstain.

After six days of hard bargaining in Doha, the Qatar capital, trade ministers approved a deal many hope will send a shot of confidence into the flagging global economy - and restore credibility to an organisation traumatized by its failure in Seattle two years ago.

‘‘We are on the verge of signing off,’’ said Sergio Marchi, Canada’s ambassador to the WTO, as applause broke out in the closed chamber where ministers were meeting.

‘‘We are anticipating the announcement any minute.’’

Marchi said India had agreed not to object to adoption of the declaration setting out an agenda for a new round of talks. Its strong objections would be noted in a separate statement, he said.

India would join the other 141 WTO members in adopting declarations on ensuring poor countries can get access to expensive Western drugs, he said, and another intended to speed up and improve the implementation of past trade agreements, which many developing countries say they have yet to benefit from.

WTO Deputy Director-General Paul-Henri Ravier said the ministers would be moving to a public plenary session soon, which is where declarations are formally adopted.

Hours earlier, the EU accepted a compromise on phasing out farm export subsidies an issue that had threatened to sink the talks earlier.

During all-night negotiating, diplomats managed a linguistic finesse on whether new trade talks should aim at ‘‘phasing out’’ farm export subsidies - as almost all of the WTO’s 142 members want.

Only the EU most emphatically France had called that wording unacceptable. France, the world’s second-biggest agricultural exporter after the United States, has a militant farm lobby and presidential elections just six months away.

A compromise was found to keep the words ‘‘phasing out’’ in the declaration, but preceded by ‘‘without prejudging the outcome of the negotiations,’’ according to the latest draft Wednesday morning.

The 15 EU nations agreed to the pact after a break to allow the French to consult with Paris.

In return, other countries were willing to accept EU demands that the new talks should take consideration of some environmental issues, negotiators said.

For example, the EU wants to clarify how agreements like the Kyoto accord on global warming relate to the WTO, and whose rules would take precedence in case of conflict.

But diplomats said India was refusing to go along with that and other concessions made to bring the Europeans into the fold.

Developing countries have resisted references to environmental protection because they fear such standards would be used as a cover to keep their goods out of the EU.

The new draft also includes talks in some areas that the EU wanted but had been previously rejected by developing countries, mainly because they said they did not yet have the capacity to tackle them.

They include rules protecting investment; assuring the equal application of competition, or antitrust, policy; making government procurement more transparent and easing red tape at customs offices.

Negotiations on these issues will not start for at least two years, however.

India also wants rich countries, mainly the United States and Canada, to agree to quicker reductions in limits on imports of textiles.

The United States, which has already compromised on poor countries’ access to patented drugs and by agreeing to a review of anti-dumping rules, says it has conceded everything it can without the approval of Congress.