WTO trade talks machine revs up after US visit

By Jonathan Lynn

GENEVA (Reuters) - A visit by U.S. trade chief Ron Kirk this month to the World Trade Organisation has transformed the political atmosphere of long-running global commerce talks, kick-starting the negotiations, trade sources said on Wednesday.

"It's like the engines are being started up again after being in cold storage for several months," one trade official said.

Diplomats cannot point to any sudden major advances in the WTO's Doha negotiations, launched in the Qatari capital in late 2001 to help poor countries prosper through trade.

But technical work on the details of trading goods from bicycles to bananas, which could lay the foundations for a future agreement, is moving along quietly.

And the feeling at a meeting of up to 30 key ambassadors with WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy to assess the state of the Doha round was to agree with Kirk that new approaches are needed to make progress on the talks, launched over seven years ago.

"Everybody in the room took the perspective: we've got to get this done," said the official after the meeting.

Negotiators do not believe the new dynamics mean a Doha deal is imminent, and argue it would still be premature to call ministers to Geneva in July to clinch an agreement.

A "mini-ministerial" last July collapsed without an agreement, the third summer in a row that a high-profile trade meeting had failed to produce results. Lamy decided at the last minute against calling another meeting last December.