Acknowledging that it has to show leadership and reduce its ‘trade distorting’ farm subsidies to take the seven-year-old Doha Round talks to a successful conclusion by this year-end, the US on Monday said the WTO member countries should use the ongoing mini-ministerial talks to take a serious note of the global food price increase and ensure that the import barriers are lowered and export subsidies are eliminated. Meanwhile, the other key representative of developed world, the European Union offered to cut agricultural tariffs by as much as 60 per cent to take forward the global trade. EU had earlier proposed to bring down tariffs by 54 per cent.Talking to reporters here, US trade representative Susan Schwab said "the US is unalterably committed to the outcome of this Round… We know we have a contribution to make when it comes to our trade distorting domestic subsidies." Schwab, last week, had said the US would make "enormous" cuts in agriculture subsidies to enable a breakthrough in the global trade talks here. The US is keen to seal the deal during the tenure of President George Bush. But the US President's trade promotion authority (TPA) has expired. This has constrined the flexibility of the other WTO member countries to negotiate with the US as the offers made by the US would now have to be ratified by the US Congress. Schwab said the US farm subsidies has been a convenient target for countries that would rather not get into the other parts of the negotiations like market access in agriculture, manufactured goods and services. "We are willing to do our share and we know we are going to need to make further contributions to the many contributions that we already have on the table. We are looking forward to seeing the contributions of others including of the most significant emerging markets," Schwab said. On the increasing global food prices, she said it was important in the context of Doha Round discussions, adding that "high food prices should enable countries to low import barriers, lower subsidies, eliminate export subsides and use this negotiations to reduce some of the distortions in the market rather than use the situation in the market as an excuse not to act." Meanwhile, talking to reporters, EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson said the EU would give a forward push to the talks "by raising the average cut in our agricultural tariff. This is a considerable improvement on our own part."However, he said the EU offer depends very much on the offers of major emerging countries like India, China and Brazil on bringing down their industrial duties to enable European manufacturers to gain better access to these developing country markets.Indian commerce secretary G K Pillai said India will have to study the EU offer in detail to assess if it is an improved version of the EU's earlier offer.
