Asia Pacific leaders to try to break WTO deadlock at Sydney summit

SINGAPORE (AFP) - Asia Pacific leaders will make another attempt to break the prolonged deadlock in global trade negotiations at their annual meeting in Australia next month, an official said Monday.

Presidents and prime ministers from the 21-member Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum are expected to issue a statement aimed at helping revive the moribund talks, said Colin Heseltine, executive director of the Singapore-based APEC secretariat.

"What APEC leaders, I think, will be putting their minds to in a couple of weeks is what they can do in terms of trying to push the Doha Round of negotiations forward, to get some progress," Heseltine told a media briefing.

"This will be one of the important priorities in Sydney in September."

Heseltine said it was not clear at this point what form the leaders' statement will take or how stronger it can get in order to break the impasse among World Trade Organisation (WTO) members.

"Negotiations are going on in Geneva during this current period, and so just precisely where APEC can fit in and what it can do I think we will just have to wait and see," he said.

At their annual meeting in Busan, South Korea in 2005 and Hanoi, Vietnam last year, APEC leaders also issued strong statements but these have failed to jumpstart the WTO talks.

APEC members, which account for 70 percent of global economic output and half of world trade, had been hoping to use their economic influence to give a strong push toward reviving the negotiations.

The grouping includes economic heavyweights like the United States and China, and covers a wide range of countries and territories stretching from Latin America to Asia.

WTO director-general Pascal Lamy will be in Sydney to attend a series of meetings involving APEC trade and foreign ministers ahead of the summit on September 8 and 9, Heseltine said.

The WTO's Doha Development Round, launched in the Qatari capital in 2001, is aimed at cutting subsidies and import duties primarily to help developing nations to take advantage of expanding global trade.

But the talks have foundered because WTO members are at odds over the extent of new cuts in barriers to trade in agriculture, industrial goods and services amid cross-cutting disagreements between rich and poor countries over the concessions they need to make.