Tokyo, April 6:

Participants in World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks on a global free trade pact should adopt more realistic targets to prevent negotiations from collapsing, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) trade chief said today.

Failure to reach an agreement on multilateral trade liberalisation would result in a tangle of bilateral deals that makes life harder for companies, said Jean-Marie Metzger, head of the OECD trade directorate. “Isn’t a realistic deal better than no deal? I think it is because of all the opportunities that would be forgone,” he said, “What is important is, certainly, to go forward. In this sense reduced ambitions cannot be the end of the road.”

The WTO is racing against the clock to craft the framework of a global liberalisation accord by April 30 and then clinch a sweeping multilateral de-al that removes trade barriers by the end of next ye-ar. Metzger questioned w-hether the system of rou-nds was the best one.

“I think it’s much better to have ongoing negotiations on many topics but with a real political will to continue towards trade liberalisation. It would be the best way, I think, to save the multilateral trading system from collapse, which would not be the end of the world but would also not be the best thing for world growth,” he said. The OECD, which groups the world’s most developed countries, is not part of negotiations.