U.S., EC Still Deadlocked in Trade Talks

Senior European Commission and United States officials ended two days of negotiations in Brussels without achieving a breakthrough in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade talks, a European Commission official said Monday.

But EC External Relations Commissioner Frans Andriessen and U.S. Trade Representative Carla Anderson Hills could meet in Toronto this weekend at a gathering of the world’s four leading trading countries, he added.

Hopes for a resolution of the longstanding trade dispute were dashed Sunday when French officials said there was no agreement in sight. But EC officials and U.S. trade officials continued to work on a deal.

“We are still making every effort to get an agreement,” EC Farm Commissioner Ray MacSharry told reporters.

But he added that it would be up to the EC’s 12 member states to decide whether to accept any eventual deal in the tariffs and trade talks, which began in 1986 with a four-year time scale and are now long overdue and still deadlocked.

MacSharry and Andriessen were holding separate talks with Hills and Agriculture Secretary Edward R. Madigan.

The main sticking points are cuts in farm export volumes, compensation to EC farmers for price and output cuts, EC barriers against imports of cereal substitutes and whether the United States should impose unilateral sanctions against trading partners.

A deal on agriculture is seen as freeing the tariff and trade talk logjam and paving the way for agreement on market access, services and freeing an extra $200 billion of trade annually.

French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas said no progress had been made in talks in Brussels to try to end the deadlock in the negotiations.

“The discussions . . . show clearly that we are much too far from the goal,” Dumas told a regional French television station Sunday. “European agriculture and particularly French agriculture absolutely cannot be sacrificed.”