*EPF417 04/22/2004
U.S. Negotiator Sees Modest Progress at WTO on Agriculture
(USTR's Johnson uncertain whether work will meet effective August deadline) (610)

By Bruce Odessey
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- A U.S. trade official says multilateral negotiators on agriculture issues are making some progress but whether they can finish their work this year is uncertain.

In an April 22 teleconference with reporters in the United States, Allen Johnson, chief U.S. agricultural trade negotiator, described the past week's World Trade Organization (WTO) session in Geneva. He was speaking from the airport near Frankfurt, Germany.

"If we don't get this done by the August break, it's probably not going to get done this year," Ambassador Johnson said, because the European Union (EU) will be changing commissioners and U.S. attention will be diverted by its national elections.

The agricultural negotiations are viewed as crucial to the success of the broader WTO round, which is called the Doha Development Agenda. Launched at Doha, Qatar, in 2001, the round is scheduled to conclude by the end of 2004, but key negotiations have long been stalled.

Johnson said that the agricultural part of the negotiations have finally made small but significant gains in just the past few weeks.

"I think what we're seeing is first of all ... a positive attitude of people trying to work through issues, not talking past each other," he said.

He said negotiators have finally agreed, at least, that they need to work first on a framework for more detailed negotiations rather than jumping immediately to precise numerical obligations on tariffs and subsidies cuts.

And he said they had accepted the usefulness of working from a draft framework released, but not accepted, at the failed September 2003 WTO ministers' meeting in Cancún, Mexico.

Negotiators are whittling down their "laundry list" of issues, he said, to just those critical issues that must be resolved in order to conclude an agreement in three major areas -- export subsidies, domestic support, and market access.

For example, Johnson said, negotiators now accept that any agreement must have some end date for eliminating export subsidies, a point crucial to the United States, and that doing so requires parallel elimination of subsidies in export credits, food aid, state trading enterprises and differential export taxes, a point crucial to the EU. The level of EU export subsidies is 75 to 100 times the U.S. level, he said.

Agricultural market access remains the most difficult set of issues, Johnson said. He said negotiators accept the notion that they have to make substantial improvements in market access through a combination of tariff cuts and expanded tariff-rate quotas (TRQs). Under TRQs, tariffs rise sharply on imports over the negotiated quota.

He said the negotiators understand that any agreement on market access must guard against destabilizing subsistence farmers in developing countries.

The United States accepts that developing countries should be allowed to commit to "less ambitious numbers" for lowering tariffs and to longer phase-in periods than other participants, and that they be allowed safeguard mechanisms to block import surges for some products, he said.

He said the United States remains willing to open market access on its politically sensitive agricultural commodities if other countries agree to open their markets to U.S. exports and if the EU and other wealthy countries agree to sharp reductions in domestic support. He said the level of EU domestic support is three to five times the U.S. level.

Johnson is a negotiator in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR). He said further agriculture negotiating sessions are scheduled in June and July, the last one just before a WTO General Council meeting in late July.

(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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