Trade Ministers Remain at Odds Over 3 Major Issues

The world’s trade ministers inched toward agreements Monday on a series of second-level agenda items in the current global trade-liberalization talks, but they remained far apart on the key issues of agriculture, services and intellectual property--the three major issues for the United States and the other major industrial countries at the talks.

The ministers are scheduled to continue meeting in small groups in an effort to finish their work here by midday Thursday. The accords on the series of smaller issues are tentative ones and could be altered--or even dropped--when the group issues its final communique.

The accord on reducing barriers on imports of tropical products was largely a symbolic gesture, aimed at coaxing developing countries into going along later with more-controversial agreements involving agriculture and services.

Differing Agendas

Essentially, it provides for the industrial countries to reduce their tariffs on 42 such products by between 20% and 100%, and to eliminate most import quotas. The products include several varieties of coffee, tea, spices, flax, oil seeds, cakes, tobacco, rice, roots, nuts, wood, rubber and hard fibers. The reductions would take effect Jan. 1.

As expected, however, the pact immediately became embroiled in the rivalry between the United States and the European Community over the larger issue of trade in agriculture. The United States wants the conferees to commit themselves to eventual elimination of all agricultural subsidies and quotas; the Europeans want only to reduce them somewhat from their present levels.

Alternative Plan

The Europeans, who pushed the tropical products pact through earlier than expected in a wee-hours session Monday, charged that the United States was blocking progress on this and on the broader agricultural issue.

But American officials asserted that the tropical products proposal that the group adopted Monday would not benefit developing countries as much as an alternative U.S. plan that the Europeans earlier had rejected. And they vowed to delay any reduction in U.S. tariffs until the ministers reach agreement on how to eliminate broader agricultural barriers.

The negotiations are being held under the aegis of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, a Geneva-based compact that administers world trade rules.