Saturday, June 17 2006 10:52 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Washington: The United States hopes to enlist the support of India, Brazil, China and other fast-developing countries as a strategy to pressure the Europeans to lower their barriers on farm imports at the upcoming Doha round of WTO trade talks.

From the American point of view, the main roadblock to progress in the multi lateral trade talks is not the so-called emerging markets like China, India or Brazil, but the European barriers, the new US trade representative, Susan Schwab, has indicated.

Without a deal on agriculture, the progress that has been made on opening doors to American services, particularly financial, would go for naught, as would what little progress had been achieved in manufactured goods, she said in an interview with the New York Times.

President George Bush has signalled that US was willing to cut subsidies on agriculture and services and manufacturing provided Europeans take a similar 'tough decision' on farming and the G20 developing countries, including Brazil and India scale back tariffs on industrial goods.

While Schwab was going to carry that message to the upcoming Doha round, Bush himself would give the same message at the EU summit next week, he told the Initiative for Global Development's 2006 National Summit in Washington Thursday.

Rejecting the American argument that the poor and developing countries of the world will side with the United States, European negotiators claim that the cuts sought by Washington in European farm products would actually hurt the poorest countries of Asia, Africa and the Caribbean by wiping out the advantages of their trade preferences in Europe.

Ministers from key WTO countries are due to meet in Geneva late June to try to negotiate a deal to free up trade in farm and industrial goods, two pillars of the WTO's Doha round, called so as they began there in 2001. Negotiations have subsequently continued in Cancún, Mexico, Geneva, Switzerland, Paris, France, and Hong Kong.