World Trade Talks Open Amid Demonstrations : Commerce: Many pressure groups are in Brussels for the final week of talks to rewrite rules. Some are upset by the U.S. call to cut farm subsidies.

Scurrying through the hallways of the negotiating center was Jack Valenti, the dapper head of the Motion Picture Assn. of America. Banished to a hotel across the street was Denis Lambert of Oxfam, representing the interests of the Third World. Out on the streets was Yves Capiteau, a French cattle farmer.

From the stylish to the scruffy, a dizzying array of pressure groups descended Monday on Brussels for the climactic week of negotiations aimed at rewriting the rules governing world trade.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” said Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Rufus Yerxa, who as a former congressional aide has long experience on the receiving end of political pressure.

The talks themselves remained deadlocked by a dispute over agricultural trade, with the United States and Europe the chief antagonists. After the first negotiating session on farm trade, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Clayton K. Yeutter said, “No progress was made tonight.”

The overall negotiating agenda is so ambitious that it would leave virtually no form of commerce untouched, and countless jobs are at stake. Negotiators from the 107 nations that began the talks four years ago continued to express hope that they could find an acceptable formula to liberalize international trade.

“I do believe that we can still, this week, put together a package that is a real reflection of all of the participants,” said Frans Andriessen, the trade negotiator for the 12-nation European Community.

Monday’s star performers were the thousands of farmers, mostly from Europe but also from the United States and even Japan, who marched through the center of Brussels to demonstrate against proposals to cut government subsidies for agriculture.

The marchers uprooted trees, set rubbish fires, set off firecrackers and vandalized bus stops. The police who dogged their steps occasionally resorted to tear gas and water cannon to disperse them. But although the demonstrators snarled transportation in central Brussels, they did not get near the headquarters offices of the European Community.

The farmers protested the demand of U.S. trade negotiators that Europe slash its subsidies by 75% or more. They even railed against the counteroffer by the European Community for a 30% reduction, even though the United States has belittled the EC offer as woefully inadequate.

Almost lost in the sea of European flags was the tiny Stars and Stripes carried by Tom Breitbach, who with his brother and three nephews operates a grain and livestock farm in Circle, Mont.

U.S. trade negotiators are effectively demanding that farmers from the United States and Europe sell their goods for the same low prices fetched by Third World farmers, Breitbach said. But the cost of living in the industrial countries, he said, is too high to make that possible.

“You’re soon going to have an agricultural community in the United States with its standard of living reduced to the lowest common denominator,” he said. “That would force us off the land.”

The marchers were not the only show in town. Across the street from the negotiating center, a group calling itself GATTastrophe--GATT is the acronym for the organization that administers world trade agreements--held a seminar on the theme that the trade talks are ignoring the needs of the Third World.

“The trade talks are very undemocratic,” said Nico Verhagen, a Dutch participant in the seminar. “There is no participation of farmers’ organizations. We demand a broad social debate.”

The rhetoric was milder in the negotiating hall itself. Businessmen from the United States and Europe quietly pressed for an agreement that would benefit their industries.

Among the U.S. executives, officially part of the private-sector advisory committee to the trade negotiators, were Citicorp Chairman John S. Reed; James Robinson III, chairman and chief executive of American Express; George Fisher, chairman and chief executive of Motorola; Edmund T. Pratt Jr., chairman and chief executive of Pfizer, and Whitney MacMillan, chairman and chief executive of Cargill.

Nico Wegter, Andriessen’s spokesman, said a similar array of European businessmen was on hand.

“We try to take into consideration the justified interests expressed here,” Wegter said. “That is part of life.”