WEALTHY COUNTRIES BRACE FOR FARMING CUTS AS WTO MAKES HISTORIC STEP.

(From ONASA News Agency)

GENEVA, Aug 1 (ONASA - AFP) - A historic drive to bring down export subsidies and many other forms of financial support for farmers forms the centrepiece of the agreement struck at the WTO Sunday, touching on a politically-charged issue worldwide. The workplan reviving deadlocked global trade talks, which was adopted by the World Trade Organisation's 147 member states after days of hard bargaining, sets the target of eliminating or reducing subsidies in what is likely to be years of tough negotiations to come. Decades into the drive for international free trade, the decision marks the first time that governments have accepted to anchor elimination in a global agreement, trade sources said. "We have agreed to make historic reforms in global agricultural trade," US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick told journalists. "This is the beginning of the end for subsidies," Brazil's Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, who was leading the G20 group of developing countries at the talks in Geneva, said. The Doha round will now aim to wipe out export subsidies, which have been a 2.8 billion euro (3.3 billion dollar) a year pillar of the European Union's help to farmers, and make more cuts in protective tariffs. Poor countries, and the EU's economic competitors, had been demanding the step for years. Wealthy nations were reluctant to make it because many of their farmers rely on support to make ends meet while prices were skewered at low levels. Developing nations blame export subsidies for artificially driving down prices, making their produce uncompetitive or diminishing the value of one of their few potential export earners. But the WTO text went further by advocating tariff cuts, restricting export credits -- a form of loan-subsidy that Washington pays to some US farmers -- and also charting cuts in domestic support that might distort international competition. Domestic support accounts for a larger proportion of the EU's budget than ...