Geneva, March 8:

Six trading powers are due to meet in London on Friday to try to narrow their differences ahead of a looming deadline for talks on bringing down barriers to commerce at the World Trade Organisation.

With just two months to go before an intermediate stage in troubled four-year-old negotiations, an arrangement between Australia, Brazil, the European Union, India, Japan and the United States is widely regarded as essential if the 143 other WTO members are to follow.

However, senior officials from these countries meeting in the British capital are not expected to make huge strides in the Doha round of trade liberalisation talks, which were launched in 2001 in the Qatari capital.

The six countries or regions, which represent a cross-section of trading interests in the talks, will be gathering for the first time since the WTO ministerial conference in Hong Kong overcame one long-standing obstacle that had defied previous deadlines.

The 149 WTO members agreed to eliminate export subsidies for farm produce by 2013. However, wide differences remain between rich and poor countries, net exporters and net importers, over tariffs for agricultural products as well as industrial goods and services.

Trade officials have set a deadline of April 30 for a settlement of those issues in order to sew together the technical details of a comprehensive barrier-busting trade deal by the end of the year.

In agriculture, the United States is demanding cuts of up to 90 percent on some tariffs, while the European Union does not want to go beyond 60 percent. Meanwhile, a similar hurdle needs to be overcome for industrial goods, known as Non Agricultural Market Access (NAMA), which largely pits rich industrialised countries against poor or emerging nations. “Converging on key issues, that mostly mean numbers, is becoming urgent,” said Don Stephenson, the Canadian ambassador trying to steer the negotiations on NAMA.

“The window for concluding the round in 2006 is awfully small. I would hope that they would begin to converge on the key modalities and at least begin to narrow the range of numbers,” he added ahead of the London meeting.

In a recent interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, WTO Director General Pascal Lamy summarised the battlelines. “Europe must make progress on its agricultural tariffs, the United States on the reduction of its domestic subsidies to farmers, and the G20 (group of emerging nations) on the customs duties for industrial goods and services,” he explained.

Diplomats said that the leading trading nations may follow up with another meeting in New York at the beginning of April. “All the ministers have understood that they will have to evolve from their current position and they are ready to do so in concert,” Lamy said.

Late last month, EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson said after a meeting with his US counterpart Rob Portman that Brussels and Washington were ready to improve their offers on agriculture, provided other countries made concessions on access to industrial and services markets.

The meeting in London of the six trade ministers, who will be joined by Lamy, is expected to last into Saturday and possibly Sunday.