Third World Nations Complain That Trade Talks Exclude Them

The world’s poor countries, which were drawn into international trade talks four years ago by promises that they would gain new export markets, are complaining now that the talks have degenerated in their final scheduled week into a U.S.-European food fight.

“We have been shut out completely,” Mokammel Hague, the Bangladeshi commerce secretary, said Wednesday. “We are feeling like schoolchildren waiting for the results to come out of the headmaster’s room.”

The “headmaster’s room” is where U.S. and Western European negotiators are trying to find common ground on the divisive issue of government payments to farmers. The United States wants subsidies slashed by 75% and more, but Europe, intent on preserving its family farmers, has offered no more than 30%.

Ministers of about half the countries participating in the talks met until shortly after midnight this morning in yet another effort to reconcile their differences over agriculture and other issues, but the closed session broke up amid emotional recriminations.

The chairman of the negotiations gave the 12-nation European Community until noon today to soften its resistance, according to his spokesman.

But the chairman, Uruguayan Foreign Minister Hector Gros-Espiell, did not spell out the consequences of missing his deadline. A spokesman, David Woods, said, “You’ll just have to wait and see.”

Some Third World delegates threatened to keep their signatures off an agreement prepared without their involvement by the industrial countries.

Brazilian trade ambassador Rubens Ricupero, saying he was speaking for more than 70 developing countries, said they had made a “firm decision to resist any attempt to impose a ready-made package put together by a few participants and presented at the last minute on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.”

Ricupero said Third World countries were fed up with a “lack of adequate attention to the areas of their special interests.”

Third World countries have substantial stakes in agriculture and many of the 14 trade arenas under negotiation. Third World textile producers are seeking to bring down barriers to their goods in the developing countries, and sugar cane producers want Europe to reduce its subsidies for sugar beets.

Many Third World delegates among the 107 nations at the negotiations are afraid that the United States and other rich countries want to open Third World markets to services and to foreign investment without giving much in return.

One Indian delegate said U.S. negotiators were asking the Europeans to open their borders to farm products and asking Third World countries to allow in foreign banks and other service providers. “What is the United States willing to give up?” he wondered.

Madagascar’s trade minister, Solofoson Georges, representing African countries at the talks, warned that any final agreement seemed “almost certain to involve losses which exceed any possible gains.”

“African countries insist on being fully involved in the final stages of the negotiating process and would not wish to be presented with a fait accompli in the form of a document decided upon by other participants.”

Delegates from the United States and other industrial countries insist that they take the Third World’s needs seriously.

“I think we’ve been sensitive to that concern,” said Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Rufus Yerxa.

Even the name of the talks symbolizes their importance to the Third World. They are called the Uruguay Round because they were launched four years ago in that South American country’s resort town of Punta del Este.

Wilfried Thalwitz, senior vice president of the World Bank, told the delegates that many poor countries had begun discarding their “inward-looking trade policy” in favor of greater trade with other countries. Their participation in the current trade talks, he said, demonstrated their new commitment to international commerce.

Michel Camdessus, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, called trade the surest way for developing countries to lift themselves out of poverty. Researcher Isabelle Maelcamp of The Times’ Brussels bureau contributed to this report.