The European Union is prepared to discuss the elimination of agricultural export subsidies on all products, European Union agriculture minister Franz Fischler said here Monday.
Fischler recalled that the EU last year asked developing countries to provide a list of specific products on which they wanted to see the subsidies scrapped.
"It is up to them to say in which products they are interested, and if they say 'all products,' then we have to engage in a discussion also about that," Fischler told a press conference at the start of talks on agriculture at the World Trade Organisation.
He said the proposed discussions could take place "under the condition that parallelism is guaranteed," meaning that talks would also focus on other forms of government export assistance, such as the food aid and export credit programs in the United States.
US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick last month said the United States could agree to remove the subsidy component from its export credit scheme.
"We have to discuss with our American friends what the 'subsidy element of export credit' means," Fischler said.
"We have to clarify this during the negotiations."
The talks here are aimed at breathing life into stalled multilateral trade liberalisation negotiations that were launched in November 2001 in the Qatari capital Doha.
The Doha round has foundered largely because of lingering disagreements over the pace at which agricultural export subsidies are to be scrapped in the United States and the European Union.
While both parties concur that the subsidies have to go, they have yet to agree on a formula for their elimination.
Developing countries are demanding an end to the subsidies, which they say distort trade and make it impossible for their farmers to compete fairly on global markets. The subsidies issue contributed largely to the failure of a WTO ministerial conference in Cancun, Mexico last September.
Fischler earlier Monday met with representatives of the United States, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, India and Mauritius.
He said all participants shared "a strong commitment" to concluding the Doha round on schedule by the end of the year.
"They all mentioned the need to show more flexibility," he added.
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