WTO trade talks machine revs up after U.S. visit

In fact, he was rebuffed on matters of substance.

Kirk, showing continuity with the previous administration of George W. Bush, said the United States wanted to see more market opening in big emerging countries like Brazil, India, China and South Africa. He repeated the call in a major speech on Monday.

But Brazil's WTO ambassador, Roberto Azevedo, told Wednesday's meeting that no one who argued there were major imbalances in the package currently being negotiated would get very far.

Another idea of Kirk's, designed to offer a new way forward in the talks, also met a cool reception, but is still being pursued by the United States.

Kirk took up a Canadian proposal to move beyond the current focus of talks which aim to reach an outline deal on the formulas for cutting tariffs and subsidies, known in WTO jargon as modalities, and go straight into detailed bilateral negotiations on cutting individual tariffs, known as scheduling.

U.S. ambassador Peter Allgeier told Wednesday's meeting this was not about skipping modalities or dropping multilateral talks but supplementing them in the interests of transparency.

Negotiators would have a clear idea of what they would get in sectors that interest them, giving them more confidence to negotiate the overall deal.

This approach met with more understanding.

"We have to have conversations with each other, and for political reasons we haven't been able to do that," said the trade official. "People seem much more ready to start talking."

It could work like this. A U.S. negotiator sits down with her Indian counterpart to get a sense of how many U.S. tractors India would be willing to import, and at what duty. In return, the Indian diplomat would make clear how many temporary work visas India would seek in return.

In fact, the WTO is training diplomats and officials on scheduling in the week of July 13, the chairman of negotiations on industrial goods, Swiss ambassador Luzius Wasescha, said.

This was intended to help them understand the complex process, not skip modalities, he told a briefing.

Wasescha said negotiations on creating duty-free zones in individual industrial sectors such as chemicals or textiles -- one of the issues that torpedoed last July's talks -- had moved on from a rich-poor confrontation to an objective and technical examination of opportunities for importers and exporters.

"For the time being we have succeeded to bring this discussion on a factual level and we no longer have... theological discussions," he said.