2ND LD: APEC leaders want WTO talks in final phase by year's end: draft.

SYDNEY, Sept. 3 Kyodo

(EDS: ADDING COMMENTS IN 12-15TH GRAFS)

Pacific Rim leaders will urge World Trade Organization members to ''enter their final phase this year'' of the Doha Round negotiations in a stand-alone statement they will issue after a two-day summit beginning Saturday in Sydney, according to a draft of the statement.

The request suggests leaders from the 21 economies of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum want the WTO's 151 member economies to reach an outline of a deal to reduce barriers to commerce in farm products, manufacturing and services by the end of the year.

''There has never been a more urgent need to make progress,'' the leaders say in the statement, which is to be issued separately from an APEC leaders' declaration to be put out at the end of the summit.

The leaders, including Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, U.S. President George W. Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao, will push for acceleration of farm and industrial goods liberalization talks based on two draft texts prepared by the Geneva-based WTO in July, says the draft statement, a copy of which was obtained Monday by Kyodo News.

''Work resumed in Geneva this month and we pledge to push hard for the progress necessary to ensure the Doha Round negotiations enter their final phase this year,'' the draft says.

''To this end, our ministers will be working with renewed energy on the basis of the draft texts tabled by the chairs of the negotiating groups on agriculture and non-agricultural market access,'' it says.

The APEC leaders' call will coincide with Monday's start of WTO negotiations on farm trade liberalization based on a draft text prepared in July by Crawford Falconer, chairman of the WTO Committee on Agriculture.

WTO economies have agreed that they will base their farm negotiations on Falconer's paper.

WTO members are scheduled to begin talks involving manufacturing goods on Sept. 17. But some developing nations -- including two APEC economies, Indonesia and the Philippines -- have opposed the margin of industrial tariff cuts proposed in July by Don Stephenson, chairman in charge of negotiations on non-agricultural market access, or NAMA.

The APEC leaders will ''insist that consensus will only be possible on the basis of an ambitious, balanced result that delivers substantial real market access for agricultural and industrial goods and for services, as well as real reductions in trade-distorting agricultural subsidies,'' the draft says.

The phrase is taken as suggesting that the leaders indirectly urge the United States to further reduce its farm subsidies, Japan and the European Union to cut agricultural tariffs and developing nations such as Brazil and India to slash tariffs on industrial goods.

''The U.S. has not offered new initiatives on trade promotion,'' a senior Southeast Asian diplomat involved in the drafting of the statement told Kyodo News in Sydney.

''The problem is that the U.S. has no numbers on domestic (agricultural) support and they have no new offer on NAMA and agriculture, lacking an effort to close the gap and bring all participants to deeper engagement on Doha,'' the diplomat said.

Separately, a senior Thai official warned that if there is no breakthrough in the multilateral process in Geneva, the U.S. Congress may not renew Bush's trade promotion authority.

''We want to see success of the forthcoming Geneva talks and the renewal of the TPA, not any stagnation,'' said Virachai Plasai, director general of the Thai Foreign Ministry's International Economic Affairs Department. The TPA, also known as fast track negotiating authority, allows the president to make trade deals on condition that Congress can approve or disapprove but cannot amend the president's decision.

Since its launch in 2001, the Doha Round has missed deadline after deadline as major emerging nations such as Brazil and India have refused to offer new market opportunities for manufacturing exports without sharper reductions in agricultural support in the United States and Europe.

Representing 60 percent of the world's gross domestic product and half the world's trade, APEC groups Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the United States and Vietnam.