Norway farmers fear WTO deal may cost 40,000 jobs

OSLO (Reuters) - Norwegian farmers protested on Thursday against a proposed world trade deal, saying that the accord being hammered out at the World Trade Organisation in Geneva could put 40,000 farmers in Norway out of work.

The proposed deal would cut tariffs on food imports and subsidies to agriculture in an effort to open developed countries' markets to farm produce from poor nations.

"The proposal for a new agreement at the World Trade Organisation, WTO, which this week may get a decisive stamp of approval, can in the long run mean 40,000 fewer farmers in Norway," the 60,000-member Norwegian farmers' union, Norges Bondelag, said in a statement.

The union's chief, Paal Haugstad, told a gathering of around 300 farmers outside the seat of government in Oslo that it could mean a loss of "40,000, maybe more".

He said if the WTO deal goes through as proposed, imports into Norway would rise and self-sufficiency decline further in a country that already imports about 50 percent of its food.

Agriculture Minister Lars Peder Brekk said the farmers organisation's numbers were exaggerated. "If these figures had been right, I wouldn't be here negotiating," Brekk told Norwegian newswire NTB in Geneva.

The union said it wants a WTO deal that secures national food production and ensures viable farming throughout Norway.

"An eventual agreement with the contents that we know of today will deprive individual countries of the right to their own food production for their own populations," Haugstad said in the statement.

"The deal is far from solving the food crisis that the world faces, but instead threatens family agriculture around the world," Haugstad said.

Seven major WTO trading partners -- Australia, Brazil, China, the European Union, India, Japan and the United States -- met on Thursday to try to salvage a deal in the WTO's Doha Round of negotiations, which began in 2001.

(Reporting by John Acher; Editing by Giles Elgood)