GENEVA, Nov 9: Top WTO negotiators said on Wednesday that they had failed to bridge key differences on a global trade accord in talks this week acknowledging that the scope of a crucial ministerial meeting in Hong Kong next month would have to be scaled back.

“The last few days have been helpful,” US Trade Representative Rob Portman told reporters in Washington in a conference call.

“But I am sorry to report that we have not been able to make the progress that we had hoped to make in order to put together a programme for the Hong Kong meeting that would enable us to set forth a framework.

“We’ve been able to bridge some differences but we have not been able to come up with the formulas or modalities to be able to negotiate into 2006.”

US Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, who joined Portman at the meetings, said: “It does appear to me that we will not make as much progress in Hong Kong as we had hoped for.”

Speaking here, EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson reported that talks in London on Monday and in Geneva on Tuesday and Wednesday had succeeded “not in narrowing differences but in defining them.”

“The gap is significant,” he said, adding: “My fear is that in lowering expectations for Hong Kong, we will cause the overall ambition for the round to fail.”

Ministers from the 148-member World Trade Organization had hoped to approve a framework accord to reduce global trade barriers, as called for in the Doha round of negotiations, at a meeting in Hong Kong from December 13 to 18.

India’s Commerce Minister Kamal Nath said the Hong Kong gathering would now have to be “recalibrated,” leaving even more do to by the end of 2006, the deadline for completing the Doha round.

“We have to make sure that whatever, even recalibrated, comes up in Hong Kong, meets the stated objective,” he cautioned.

Nath and other officials predicted that another ministerial conference would likely be called by March to make up lost ground.

The Doha round, launched in the capital city of Qatar in late 2001, has foundered on deep disagreements on the pace and scope of measures to cut trade-distorting agricultural subsidies in rich countries and to lower import tariffs on farm produce and industrial goods.

Powerful developing countries such as Brazil and India argue that subsidies and tariffs in rich nations — the United States and the European Union in particular — depress global farm prices and prevent growers in poor nations from competing effectively on world markets.

Developing countries have dismissed trade-opening offers from the EU and the United States as insufficient.

The EU has come in for the sharpest criticism, which has been rejected by Mandelson.

“As far as the European Union is concerned, I feel that we have done everything we could reasonably be expected to do in agriculture to build bridges,” he said.

“These moves, quite simply, have not been reciprocated by our partners.”

Brazil and India, who steer the powerful G-20 developing country lobby, have resisted stepping up negotiations on trade in industrial products and services, such as banking, until the farm controversy is settled.—AFP