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Japan's trade, farm ministers to join talks of major WTO players+(Japan Economic Newswire Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)TOKYO, March 7_(Kyodo) _ Japan's trade and farm ministers are scheduled to take part in a ministerial meeting of six major players in the World Trade Organization negotiations from Friday in London, Japanese officials said Tuesday. Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Toshihiro Nikai and Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Shoichi Nakagawa will join the three-day talks organized by the European Union, ahead of the end-of-April deadline for WTO members to produce an outline of a comprehensive trade deal with numerical goals, they said. The six key WTO players are the United States, the European Union, Brazil, India, Japan and Australia. WTO members aim to agree on details of trade liberalization measures such as tariff cut formulas by late April, so as to finish the current Doha Round of negotiations by the end of the year. WTO Director General Pascal Lamy will also participate in the event, the officials said. During the past negotiations at the WTO headquarters in Geneva, major economies have presented their simulation analyses on tariff-cutting formulas in agricultural and industrial areas using numerical data, they said. Japan hopes that these data will create a common platform for understanding the impact on each economy of a possible deal at the WTO and will lead to new proposals in the talks, they added. Meanwhile, Nakagawa said earlier that he hopes to meet with U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns on the sidelines of the WTO talks to discuss how to lift Japan's reinstated import ban on U.S. beef. Japan terminated a two-year-old ban on U.S. beef imports last December which had been imposed following the discovery of mad cow disease in the United States. The brain-wasting disease is formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The ban was reinstated in January after backbone, which is considered a BSE risk, was found in a shipment of U.S. veal in Tokyo. |