Trade ministers and ambassadors from 20 countries met here on Friday but made no formal announcement whether global trade negotiations that broke down last September would resume in time to meet the Jan. 1, 2005, deadline for their completion.
Both the WTO and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan are pushing to resume the talks, which are supposed to reform the world's trading system by reducing farm subsidies in the developed world that prevent farmers in developing countries from selling their goods on Western markets.
"More than anything else, we need a poor-friendly deal on agriculture," Annan told a gathering of the World Economic Forum. "No single issue more gravely imperils the multilateral trading system, from which you benefit so much," he told business leaders.
"Agricultural subsidies skew market forces. They destroy the environment. And they block poor-country exports from world markets, keeping them from earning revenues that would dwarf any conceivable level of aid and investment flows to those countries," he said.
The trade talks, known as the Doha round and held under the auspices of the WTO, broke down in Cancun, Mexico, last September. There has been no word yet when they may resume.
At Friday's talks here on the fringes of the World Economic Forum "everybody was on board for trying to get things restarted," said a trade official who attended the gathering.
Both Robert Zoellick, the US chief trade envoy, and Pascal Lamy, the EU's top trade official, have sent letters to the WTO since the breakdown of the negotiations offering proposals to restart them. But neither of those negotiators attended Friday's talks.
The trade official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said different countries from the 146-member WTO had favored different ways of restarting the negotiations. The differences inspired President Joseph Deiss of Switzerland, who was the host for the discussions, to say he did not believe the talks would be completed by the end of the year.
The official, moreover, said that if negotiators could not agree on the broad framework of the agreement by the middle of this year "then we are not going to meet the deadline."
At a news conference, Supachai Panitchpakdi, the director-general of the WTO, said he believed that the organization had to act quickly.
"I don't believe we can take even a few more days," he told a press conference. "We should move and work and set the time as tightly as possible."
He said that he believed that it was possible to "fix it this year."
"We have the time," he said. "It's up to the political will."
Some trade negotiators said they believed that Friday's meeting had improved chances of restarting the negotiations.
"I think it helps," said Alec Erwin, South Africa's trade and industry minister.
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