By Bruce Odessey
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- A top U.S. official says he is somewhat encouraged by resumption of World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations in agriculture after a seven-month suspension.

Allen Johnson, chief U.S. agricultural trade negotiator, said developing country participants have moved beyond the rhetoric that characterized WTO negotiations before and during the failed September 2003 ministers' meeting in CancĂșn, Mexico.

The agriculture negotiations in Geneva during the week of March 22 are the first since August 2003. Johnson was in Geneva March 25 answering questions from reporters in Washington.

"We have ... seen a generally positive attitude that encourages me this week," Johnson said. "I've seen countries engage in serious discussion about the issues. We don't see a lot of rhetoric."

Before the CancĂșn meeting, he said, participants were taking completely different approaches on agriculture. Now they are all working from the draft text submitted in CancĂșn as a point of departure, he said.

"I don't want to underestimate the difficulties we have in front of us," Johnson added.

For the United States and many, if not most, other countries, agriculture trade reform is crucial to completing the WTO negotiations, which are called the Doha Development Agenda.

Johnson said participants view this meeting and another one likely to be scheduled soon, possibly in April, as steps to forging by summer a framework for more detailed negotiations, including setting numeric goals for reducing tariffs and subsidies.

The United States is insisting that WTO participants commit to negotiate a deadline for eliminating export subsidies, he said. The European Union (EU), which uses nearly 100 times the level of export subsidies used by the United States, resists this demand.

"Part of our responsibility is to try to understand what environment they need" in order to make that commitment, Johnson said, "but make it very clear to them that that is what's going to have to be done if this round is going to succeed."

The EU is insisting on parallel elimination of subsidies in export credits, food aid, state trading enterprises and differential export taxes. Johnson said the United States is willing to eliminate the export subsidy element of its export credits on the same schedule as the EU eliminates its export subsidies. He added that the United States is willing to negotiate disciplines on food aid as long as those disciplines do not prevent food going to the hungry.

Johnson said the United States still wants to reduce sharply the level of domestic agricultural subsidies -- the EU level is three to five times the U.S. level.

Additionally, he said the United States needs much wider access to foreign agricultural markets, in both developed and developing countries. The United States had proposed that tariffs be reduced by what is called a Swiss formula, where the highest tariffs are reduced the most and no tariffs exceed 25 percent.

That would depart fundamentally from the less-ambitious approach taken in the Uruguay Round of negotiations, which required only a mix of minimum and average cuts.

Johnson said the United States was indicating to other participants that it might go along with a Uruguay Round approach for 2-3 percent of agricultural items, the most politically sensitive ones.

Also, he said, the United States was willing to consider special and differential treatment case by case for developing countries' tariffs to avoid hardship for subsistence farmers.