GATT Talks Relaunched in Private Sessions : Trade: France still threatens to block a global pact that it says will hurt its oilseed farmers.

World trade officials have begun informal talks on industrial and agricultural output under the newly relaunched Uruguay Round of negotiations aimed at liberalizing world trade, a GATT spokesman said Friday.

“Consultations have already started informally and will be going on through next week,” spokesman David Woods said.

Negotiators were holding private meetings to discuss market access for their industrial and farm products under a global accord.

Arthur Dunkel, director general of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, announced Thursday that negotiators from 108 countries had agreed to try to reach a “successful political conclusion” of the six-year talks by year’s end.

“The main point is the multilateral negotiations have taken off again,” he told reporters after agreement was reached in the Trade Negotiating Committee, the round’s steering organ.

Substantive negotiations were to resume to draft detailed tariff schedules over the next few months for eventual signing and ratification by governments, Dunkel added.

The talks, launched in 1986, have been stalled for the last year, largely because of an impasse between the United States and the European Community on reducing agricultural subsidies.

That dispute, as well as a separate disagreement between the two trading blocs over EC oilseed subsidies--which had been overshadowing the multilateral round--was resolved in Washington last week.

But France has threatened to veto the accord to reduce EC farm export subsidies, as well as the pact under which the EC would cut production of subsidized oilseeds.

However, the 12-nation EC negotiates as a bloc in GATT, and therefore multilateral negotiations continue despite the threat from Paris.

A two-day session of the GATT’s “contracting parties,” the most senior organ of the 105-member state body, is to open in Geneva on Wednesday, Dec. 2.