Big cuts sought in tropical products duties at WTO

GENEVA, Mar 9 (Reuters) Leading farm exporting countries called today for developed states to slash duties on tropical products such as rice, bananas and sugar by at least 85 percent in any global free trade deal.

The Australia-led Cairns Group, whose 19 member states include several Latin American countries such as Brazil, Argentina and Peru, said current duties should be reduced sharply or abolished.

Diplomats said the proposal, presented at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), where free trade talks are under way, was certain to face stiff opposition from the likes of Japan, where rice tariffs can run to several hundred per cent.

Some developing countries, particularly poorer WTO member states in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, could also object to the idea because it could undermine preferential deals that they have with the European Union, in particular, to export their tropical products.

The same tariff cut -- a 85 per cent reduction for duties over 25 per cent and elimination of anything below -- would also apply to crops grown by developing countries under programmes designed to offer farmers an alternative to drug production, the Cairns group said in a statement.

Developed countries would also be barred from including any tropical crop among so-called ''sensitive products,'' a small number of goods that they will be able to shield from the deepest tariff cuts as part of a free trade accord.

Negotiations on a new WTO pact have recently resumed at the 150-state organisation, but there are no signs yet of a breakthrough, which senior diplomats say must come soon or the five-year-old talks may collapse.

Agriculture has long been the most politically complex area of the negotiations.

Richer nations are under pressure to agree more aggressive reductions in farm subsidies and tariffs, with developing states being asked to open markets to industrial goods and services.

REUTERS PDM KN2238