Brussels, 30/04/2007 (Agence Europe) - Having promised last week to “provoke” the member countries of the WTO by detailed proposals containing sizable drops in subsidies and customs duty in the hope of reaching a compromise on the details for liberalisation in trade in agriculture, Crawford Falconer added gestures to words. In a document published on Monday and in which he lays out a first raft of ideas on possible convergences between the positions of the members, the New Zealand President of the committee on agricultural negotiations of the WTO says the United States must, as a priority, reduce their internal support to agriculture below the ceiling of expenditure of 19 billion dollars a year. “It is frankly inconceivable that the US will come out of this negotiation with an entitlement to spend more on overall trade-distorting domestic support than it had when it came in” he said, not mincing his words towards Washington. Whereas the current American proposal allows Washington to make internal support totalling an annual 22 billion dollars, Mr Falconer believes that “the centre of gravity around which negotiations will focus is certainly below 19 billion dollars and somewhere above the very low teens (between 13 and 15 billion dollars a year: Ed)”. Nor is Europe spared: Mr Falconer believes that the Union should, for its part, reduce its trade distorting support by 75 to 80%, as opposed to the 70% which it is currently proposing. The reduction of 75% would bring it within the neighbourhood of 27.5 billion EUR, he pointed out. “It is now time to make honest proposals”, insisted Mr Falconer, in the conclusion of the document with which he intends to provoke some comments from the members on points which may be the subject of a consensus leading into a revision or a series of revisions on the draft details of 2006. He reiterated that “if we do not get serious momentum over the next few weeks… we will either fail or we will put this whole exercise in the freezer for some considerable time until a better generation than us can thaw it out”. (eh)