Five core members of the World Trade Organisation ended hours of hard bargaining by agreeing principles that could open the way to a deal on a pact by the full membership, a leading negotiator said yesterday.

“It brings the possibility of an agreement (of the full membership) nearer,” the negotiator, who had been involved in the talks, told Reuters.

The five are the United States, the European Union, Australia, India and Brazil, who are considered to represent a wide range of trade interests within the 147-state body and whose agreement on a deal is crucial for any chance on progress to liberalise global trade and boost the world’s economy.

The WTO has set itself until midnight on Friday to seal outline deals in four key areas – farm and industrial goods, services and a new customs’ code – in a bid to put its troubled Doha Round of free trade negotiations back on track. However, a number of other members, including Switzerland, suspicious at the leading role assumed by the five, have warned that they will not be railroaded into anything just because the big trading powers back it.

The negotiator, who declined to be named or to go into detail, said that the ideas accepted by the five covered all points of the hotly disputed text on agricultural reform, which is widely seen as crucial to an overall pact.

Officially, both the United States and the European Union were guarded in their comments as the “Big Five” are anxious not to be seen as dictating any final WTO decision.

“We believe that we have provided (New Zealand ambassador Tim) Groser with political guidance,” said EU spokesman in Geneva Fabian Delcros, referring to the diplomat who is mediating the farm talks and who sat in on the session. “The meeting has been useful and good,” said Rich Mills, spokesman for US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, who took part in the talks along with EU counterpart Pascal Lamy.

The result of the talks between the five will set the tone for proposals chief mediators, WTO chief Supachai Panitchpakdi and the organisation’s executive General Council chairman Shotaro Oshima of Japan, will now put to the full body. “If we the five do not have agreement on the issues, it is hard to see how an agreement amongst the others can be found,” Lamy’s spokeswoman Arancha Gonzalez told journalists.

Diplomats said that they did not expect Supachai and Oshima to produce their draft until late Thursday or even Friday morning, leaving little time for a deal to be struck.

Although there were still problems in the other issues, diplomats said that there was a good chance that they could quickly be overcome once the all-important question of agriculture had been decided.

“The feeling is that they are all doable,” said one diplomat, who asked not to be named. Negotiators are struggling for accord on a framework for the next stage of the Doha Round, launched in the Qatar capital in 2001 but effectively derailed since the collapse of a WTO meeting of trade ministers in Cancun, Mexico last September.

Such a deal would let them say the Doha Round was back on track, but failure could postpone for years further progress on liberalising trade, with its promise of a multi-billion-dollar boost to the world economy, trade officials say. The central problem is farm trade reform, and the future of rich power subsidies. There were deep differences on the issue between North and South, and between the United States and the 25-nation EU.

<B>Richard Waddington</B>