Agenda, Timetable Set for Talks on International Trade

Negotiators from 96 countries, including the United States, reached formal agreement Saturday in Geneva on a detailed agenda and timetable for the most sweeping set of global trade liberalization talks in history--with plans to begin the talks as early as this week.

The accord, which sets the terms for 21 months of hard bargaining over key trade issues, paves the way for extending international trade rules to 15 new subject areas, from agriculture and services to investment and intellectual property, such as patents.

The consensus on the negotiating mandate--worked out under the aegis of the Geneva-based General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the 96-country compact that sets and enforces global trading rules--came after agreement was reached late Friday on parameters for talks on agricultural trade.

Work Into Morning

The negotiators worked into Saturday morning to complete negotiating agendas covering talks in two other areas--trade in textiles and limits on temporary protection to industries that are seriously injured by an unexpected surge of imports.

The agreement on the negotiating outline clears the way for trade officials to begin serious bargaining on the substantive issues in the talks. The negotiations, known formally as the Uruguay Round, are scheduled to come to a close in December, 1990.

U.S. Trade Representative Carla Anderson Hills said Saturday in Washington that the negotiators will “go to work immediately” in Geneva this week to launch the discussions on key issues. Hills is expected to make several appearances before Congress this week to explain the process.

Saturday’s agreement broke an impasse that has plagued the GATT talks for months. The negotiators were supposed to have finished the agenda at a ministerial meeting in Montreal in December, but they broke up in disarray then because of a stalemate over the farm trade issue.

Would Extend Rules

The United States proposed the broad-scale trade talks in 1982 as a way of invigorating the world trading system and extending current global rules on trade practices to cover areas such as agriculture and services, which have not previously been included.

Under the plan on which participants agreed in 1986, when the Uruguay Round was launched, the first two years of talks were designed to hammer out the terms of the negotiations that would take place in 1989 and 1990. That is the phase the negotiators have completed now.

Hills cautioned Saturday that eliminating more trade barriers, as the negotiators have pledged to do, would not in itself reduce the United States’ huge trade deficit, but she said it would help bring about a “correction” by providing “a context of trade expansion.”

Hills reiterated that the negotiating countries have put all of their trade barriers “on the table” for the new trade talks. The United States “is dedicated to reducing . . . distortions across-the-board if our trading partners do the same,” she said.

Motive to Succeed

She also dismissed suggestions that the trade talks might fail. “There is enough at stake to cause all parties in the world to want to succeed,” she said at a press conference.

Besides writing new rules for areas such as trade in services, the negotiators also hope to hammer out a new dispute-settlement procedure in the GATT to help resolve trade frictions between two or more members. Washington has complained recently that current rules are too weak.

Subsidies, Tariffs Included

Along with trade in agriculture, services, investment and intellectual property, the talks also are expected to deal with excessive government subsidies, further reductions in tariffs, and trade in tropical products, which are grown mainly by developing countries.

The language on talks over trade in agriculture calls for negotiating “a substantial, progressive reduction” in government farm subsidies over several years, and for an immediate freeze--and some rollbacks, where possible--of current farm trade barriers.

Although the wording fell somewhat short of the total elimination of agricultural trade barriers that the United States had wanted to make U.S. farm products more competitive overseas, Hills said Washington was pleased with the outcome because it pointed the talks in the direction that the Administration wants.

“I don’t think that we have to stop short” of the U.S. goal in the talks, she said. “If you have a ‘substantial, progressive reduction’ of agricultural subsidies and trade barriers, as the agreement says, there’s no way you can’t get down to zero,” she asserted.