Global Trade Talks Reopen After Reports of Progress

Diplomats reopened world trade talks in an upbeat mood Monday after progress was made during weekend discussions between President Bush and the European Community on the thorny issue of farm subsidies.

The chiefs of the various negotiating groups were tackling their work with greater urgency, said one source close to Arthur Dunkel, director-general of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the world trade body overseeing the talks.

Bush met with European Commission President Jacques Delors and Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers in The Hague on Saturday in a bid to speed up the long-overdue conclusion to the talks, which are meant to boost world trade. The talks include 108 nations under the auspices of GATT.

The European Commission is the executive body of the 12-nation EC.

Meanwhile, there was a sign of progress from Japan, where Secretary of State James A. Baker III met with top officials over trade and other issues.

Over the weekend Bush, Delors and Lubbers discussed the biggest area of disagreement in the 5-year-old talks--how deeply and how broadly to cut trade-distorting farm subsidies. The EC is resisting deep cuts called for by the United States and other farm exporters.

U.S. and EC leaders said they had narrowed their differences and endorsed a new year-end deadline. They instructed their delegations in Geneva to move quickly to bridge any remaining gaps.

One EC source said the gap in agriculture reforms had narrowed to a few points, a far cry from last December, when the talks collapsed because of wide differences on even the basics of cutting farm subsidies.

The ministers were supposed to have wrapped up the current round of talks at December’s meetings.

“Dunkel and the chairmen of the groups are working with an even greater sense of purpose than before the meeting in The Hague,” said the source close to Dunkel.