Thursday, May 5 2005 09:42 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Paris: World Trade Organisation (WTO) Ministers have reached an agreement on a technical issue of calculating tariffs that was blocking the Doha round of global trade negotiations, Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said yesterday (May 4, 2005).

"We have an accord on the AVE," Amorim told reporters on the sidelines of a WTO meeting in Paris.

He was referring to "ad-valorem equivalent" (AVE), a method for converting tariffs currently expressed in a nominal value, such as Euros or Dollars per tonne, into a percentage of the price to enable comparison.

The trade Ministers were mounting 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 had said ahead of the meeting of about 30 Ministers from rich and poor nations.

With deadlines looming, the diplomats sought to kick-start the Doha round of trade liberalisation talks, launched in the Qatari capital in 2001.

"The question now is whether we are on course or not," he said.

"I am afraid that the short reply is that we are not. If we do not move ahead rapidly in the key areas of the negotiations we will certainly be facing a major problem," Supachai warned.

The technical but key tariffs issue divided wealthy food-importing nations such as the European Union (EU) and Switzerland and exporting countries and needed to be agreed upon before talks could move on to a formula for tariff cuts.