Brazil wants to restart collapsed global trade negotiations and believes an agreement can be reached within two months, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Saturday. Economists, however, are saying that any new attempt to grasp the grail of a world trade pact will probably have to wait until next year, after elections in the United States and India, despite some calls for more talks now. Marathon talks on a new global trade pact collapsed in Geneva on Tuesday as the United States and India refused to compromise over a proposal to help poor farmers deal with floods of imports. “I think if we can resolve the problem between India and the United States, I think we'll have an accord. It can take a month, two months, but we need to sign an accord,” Lula told reporters in Sao Paulo after a ceremony with metalworkers outside the city. Lula spoke with US President George W. Bush by telephone on Saturday and the two leaders expressed their disappointment over the collapse of the negotiations and their commitment to concluding an agreement. “I said to President Bush that it's not possible for people to just lie on the beach after so much work, after so much meeting and negotiation. I think, if the problem between India and the United States is resolved, an agreement will be signed,” he said. The head of the WTO, Pascal Lamy, who stressed after the collapse of the talks in Geneva last week that the gains made in nine days must remain on the table, revealed on Friday that talks at technical level were in fact continuing. He also said he expected to visit India in a week's time and perhaps the United States later. He was referring to two of the countries at the centre of the emotional breakdown of talks which, participants agreed, had almost joined hands across a deep gulf over special arrangements for protection against a flood of imports. Lula said he would speak to China's president, Hu Jintao, during a planned visit to the Asian nation which hosts the Olympic Games starting Friday. He said he would also talk to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and possibly British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. “Something abnormal happened, in my opinion, during the Doha Round. We were so close to making an agreement and it didn't happen because of minor issues,” he said. Ministers from about 35 key World Trade Organization countries reached about 80-85 percent of an outline for a trade deal on the core areas of agriculture and industrial goods. But differences in these areas between rich and poor countries and importers and exporters proved too much to bridge. The final stumbling block concerned the “special safeguard mechanism” – a proposal to let developing countries raise farm tariffs in the face of a surge in imports or collapse in prices. Developing countries like India and Indonesia said they needed the measure to protect millions of subsistence farmers from unexpected shocks arising from opening up their borders. But the United States feared its agribusinesses would lose new markets just as it made painful cuts in its farm subsidies. Brazil, one of the world's leading farm exporters, was a key player in the round as a leader of developing countries. A senior WTO official said: “It seems practically impossible to conclude negotiations before the end of the year. “The idea is to continue to advance to be able to present a package all tied up to the new US administration and to India after the (US presidential) elections,” he said. Meawnhile, Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said: “The talks will not be able to resume until after the American elections.” The talks last week struggled late into many nights and through many issues affecting directly or indirectly the peoples of the world, of all classes in all sectors on all continents. There was general agreement, but from different angles, that the world's poorest stand to gain or los the most. The breakdown threw up various views of the future, from analysis that emerging countries have gained new stature to suggestions that the talks should treat agriculture separately from other subjects. Stiglitz said a quick resumption of the talks was all the more unlikely because it is “difficult to negotiate an accord when unemployment is on the rise and the economy is weakening.” India, one of the key players at the talks, is also facing elections at the end of the year, which leaves the government little room for concessions. The audacious attempt in Geneva to break apart a seven-year log jam in the so-called Doha Round of trade opening talks, hit deadlock between India and the US over the so-called special safeguard mechanism. This enables countries to impose a special tariff on certain agricultural goods in the event of an import surge or price fall. Stiglitz was scathing of Washington's insistence that extra duties should be imposed only if imports surged by 40 percent. “Nobody in agriculture has a 40-percent margin,” he said. “A 40-percent decline in price would have put most developing countries into bankruptcy. The issue was one of very survival.”
