Brazil had asked wealthy western nations to call a special summit to kickstart the dialogue and ensure a global agreement on trade was met before the April deadline, Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said yesterday. Amorim told a news briefing after a two-day summit of centre-left government leaders that western leaders had indicated a willingness to push harder for a deal, although the specific steps remained vague.

The leaders at the summit included host President Thabo Mbeki, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, Korean Prime Minister Hae-chan Lee, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

“If you ask of specific progress, I’d say we are committed to remaining engaged. We’d be prepared to add the political impetus required to reach an agreement,” Amorim said.

At December’s World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting in Hong Kong, ministers set the end of April as the deadline for a draft deal on opening agricultural and industrial markets, a key part of the WTO’s so-called Doha round negotiations. Details of the overall pact need to be finalised by the end of this year if the pact is to be ratified as planned next year.

“We need a meeting we believe leaders are willing to participate in to prepare for the completion of the round,” Amorim said.

Although the leaders could not say when this summit would be held, Blair said a trade deal was in the “moral interest and self-interest” of his country and that it was urgent that progress be made.

Blair called for a new push on trade talks, saying failure to reach a deal could spell doom for the world’s poor. “It is a shared perspective that we have reached a critical stage in trade talks,” Blair said. “What is clear is that failure on the world trade round would be a devastating blow to the poorest countries in the world,” he said.

At issue is the question of access to EU agricultural markets and subsidies to EU and US farmers and the level of tariffs on industrial goods. Sources said Brazil had used the meeting to suggest an urgent summit of the Group of Eight (G-8) rich countries to discuss trade, but Blair appeared reluctant to convene such a gathering if success was not assured.

Brazil’s Lula said that his country was ready to make concessions to reach a world trade deal, but only if the developed world also stood ready to bargain. “It is of concern to ourselves that making concessions should not drive any of us over the edge,” Lula said.

“Failure of the Doha round would seriously affect the multilateral system of doing things and would undermine the reform of institutions like the United Nations... because this would mean the minority and less influential, mostly poor or developing countries, always get nothing.”

UK Trade and Industry Minister Allan Johnson said prospects for a trade deal were encouraging because no country had yet put a final offer.

The summit was preceded by a roundtable discussion on trade that was attended by EU trade commissioner Peter Mandelson and WTO director-general Pascal Lamy. With Reuters