Developing countries, many already sceptical about the outcome of world trade talks, gave a cool response on Wednesday to a US call to abolish tariffs on industrial goods by 2015.
"It does not seem very realistic to me," said one Latin American diplomat at the Geneva headquarters of the WTO, where the Doha Round of negotiations to free up global trade are in full swing.
"The political reality is that there is no climate for such a radical approach at this stage," he said.
The US, which has sought to set the pace in the WTO talks, launched in the Qatari capital last November, unveiled in Washington on Tuesday its vision of a "tariff-free world" it said would benefit consumers around the globe.
Under the proposal, expected to be presented to the WTO next week, countries would agree on a two-phase plan that would see tariffs on goods such as textiles, chemicals and cars cut to less than eight percent by 2010, from the current global average of 40 percent, and to zero five years later.
It "would complete an ambitious global project that is 50 years in the making," US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick said.
Trade officials say slashing tariffs on industrial goods, which account from over half of overall developing country trade, could put billions of dollars into consumers' pockets.
"These ambitious proposals are helpful to generate momentum for the overall negotiations," WTO Director-General Supachai Panitchpakdi's spokesman quoted him as saying.
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