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GENEVA: Pascal Lamy, the director general of the World Trade Organisation, has presented WTO members with a draft declaration on the Doha global trade talks for ministers to endorse when they meet in Hong Kong in two weeks' time.
Mr Lamy has said the draft, to be discussed by the WTO's trade negotiations committee on Wednesday, will reflect the current state of play, and will not seek to propose compromises where there is no consensus.
But the reports from the various negotiating groups on which Mr Lamy's draft will be based have already come in for criticism, notably from the European Union (EU), signalling a difficult meeting in Hong Kong.
WTO members have abandoned their original objective of agreeing an interim trade package at the conference that would set detailed guidelines for concluding the Doha round in 2006. But they still hope to use the Hong Kong meeting as a negotiating forum that would push the talks towards an accord early next year.
Peter Mandelson, the EU trade commissioner, complained late last week that the reports relating to talks on industrial tariffs and services showed a lowering of ambition compared with agriculture. "This reinforces the need to restore balance in the negotiations, which hope my negotiating partners will now support."
The EU has made its offer to cut farm tariffs conditional on cuts in industrial tariffs by emerging economies, and their commitment to liberalise a certain number of services sectors.
Brussels has been particularly disappointed by the decision of the chairman of the services talks to drop a reference to quantitative targets in his report.
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