PARIS, May 4: WTO ministers reached on Wednesday an agreement on a technical issue of calculating tariffs that had blocked the Doha round of global trade talks, Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said. “We have an accord on the AVE,” Amorim told reporters on the sidelines of a World Trade Organization meeting in Paris.

He was referring to “ad-valorem equivalent”, a method for converting tariffs currently expressed in a nominal value, such as euros or dollars per ton, into a percentage of the price to enable comparison.

“With this agreement, which must still be accepted by all the (WTO) members, we have broken a deadlock in the negotiations.” EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson said: “I’m very pleased with this result. Our proposal has now been accepted by the countries that have the greatest stakes in the agriculture negotiations. It fully preserves the interest of the EU.

“The road is now clear for rapid and substantial progress in the DDA (Doha development agenda) across the board including manufactured goods and services.”

Rob Portman, the new US trade representative, added: “I think it was a significant breakthrough today in a lot of different respects.” The main one, he said, was injecting additional energy into the round, “and showing that we’re all willing to roll up our sleeves and to make some compromises to move forward.”

The trade ministers had mounted a fresh bid to breathe life into flagging global trade negotiations, with the head of the WTO issuing a new warning that the talks could be headed for failure.

“This meeting comes at a crucial moment,” WTO Director General Supachai Panitchpakdi said ahead of the meeting of about 30 ministers from rich and poor nations.

With deadlines looming, the diplomats sought to kickstart the Doha round of trade liberalization talks, launched in the Qatari capital in 2001. The technical but key tariffs issue divided wealthy food-importing nations such as those in the EU and Switzerland, and exporting countries and needed to be agreed upon before talks could move on to a formula for tariff cuts.

“I think we made good progress and we made good progress thanks to the fact that everybody was able to show flexibility,” Amorim said.—AFP