PARIS, May 3: Trade ministers gathered in Paris on Tuesday to take another stab at preserving the Doha negotiations to reduce global trade barriers, at talks on the sidelines of an OECD ministerial meeting. The European Union’s trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, took part in discussions on manufactured products, and then met with the so-called “club of five” — Australia, Brazil, the European Union, India and the United States — about the obstacles to a World Trade Organization accord, his spokesman said.

The US was pushing for an agreement on the issue of how to calculate customs duties, a US trade official said. The ad valorem equivalent issue centres on the method of converting, into a percentage, customs tariffs currently expressed in a nominal value, such as euros per tonne.

“On the AVE (ad valorem equivalent) issue, this problem has not been solved yet. People are continuing to work. The US is continuing to try to bring different parties together,” the US trade official said.

An agreement is crucial to subsequent discussions on a formula for lowering tariffs around the world. The Doha talks were launched at a WTO ministerial meeting in the Qatari capital in November 2001. But they have been dogged ever since by disputes between rich and poor countries over such questions as agricultural export subsidies and tariffs on industrial goods.

About a dozen members of the Group of 20 (G20), an informal forum of industrial nations and emerging-market countries, also met, according to a spokesman for the Brazilian foreign minister, Celso Amorim. The talks included Argentina, Brasil, China, Egypt, India and Pakistan, he said. Tuesday’s discussions were in preparation for a meeting on Wednesday of key WTO members on the sidelines of the annual ministerial meeting of the OECD.

The trade meeting will seek to make progress in negotiations on agriculture and services between now and the WTO conference set for December in Hong Kong. But major differences remain among the 148 WTO members. Developing countries want a reduction in agricultural subsidies by rich countries, which in turn are calling for more open markets for industrial products and services.

“We cannot move ahead only on the agriculture issue and do nothing about services and industrial goods,” a spokesman for Mandelson told AFP. EU agriculture commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel also stressed the urgency of progress in talks ahead of the looming deadlines.

“We must make progress soon if we are to have a draft agreement on paper by this summer. This is vital if we are to reach an all-embracing deal in Hong Kong in December,” she said in a statement.—AFP