Push for global trade deal, poor countries told

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Poor countries must push for a global deal in the stalled World Trade Organization (WTO) talks and not settle for bilateral arrangements, a top Commonwealth official said on Wednesday.

Commonwealth Secretary-General Don McKinnon said only the United States and the European Union could afford a total collapse of the talks known as the Doha Round, which deadlocked in July due to an impasse over farm subsidies.

Time is running out to conclude the five-year-old talks because the U.S. Bush administration's "fast track" trade negotiating powers, which allow it to broker deals that go to an expedited vote in Congress, expire in June.

"The failure of the world trade talks and a retreat to bilateral or regional trade deals is not a solution," McKinnon told a meeting of business leaders in Kenya's capital Nairobi.

"There are only two groups in the world that do not need an international rule system of trade -- the US and the EU because they are so big -- but everyone else does."

A meeting of about 30 trade ministers to discuss how to resume the Doha Round is scheduled to take place alongside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Negotiators say the EU and the U.S. have been trying to narrow differences over the politically sensitive agriculture issues to help break the impasse, but differences remain.

"The secret of this is in the hands of the president of the U.S. and the commission president. Those are the two that can make this whole thing work, we want them to do so," McKinnon said.

The Commonwealth groups 53 countries, mainly former British colonies. Eighteen of them are in Africa where the agricultural and industrial sectors would suffer most should the WTO negotiations fail completely.

FARMERS PROTEST

Hundreds of farmers from developing countries such as the Dominican Republic and Mozambique, attending a World Social Forum in Nairobi, marched to the EU offices there on Wednesday to protest the proposed free trade agreements with the bloc.

The EU is negotiating with six regions in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP) to gradually open up their markets to tariff-free imports from the EU starting January 2008.

"We are deeply concerned that these proposed free trade agreements will exacerbate the current agricultural crisis that farmers already face," read a petition by the maize stalk- carrying protestors, presented to the head of the EU in Kenya.

Campaigners at the social forum, a counter-balance to the Davos gathering, have asked the bloc to stop asking the ACP countries to sign the trade agreements, saying their economies were not ready.

On receiving the petition, the head of the European Commission in Nairobi, Eric van der Linden, defended the so-called economic partnership agreements (EPAs) as a tool to prop up development and regional integration.

"Our motive in pinning down the EPAs is ... to help poor developing countries integrate into the global economy," he told the placard-waving marchers. "The EPAs are not about winning trade concessions for Europe."

(Additional reporting by Bosire Nyairo)