PARIS, Feb 23: French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Saturday the European Union was making too many concessions in current World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks and called for emerging countries to show more goodwill.

He said the European Union needed to defend its interests more vigorously and France would oppose any deal that went against its interests and those of the 27-nation bloc.

“I regret that Europe is making more and more important concessions without anything in exchange. This attitude is an impasse,” Sarkozy said at the inauguration of the Paris annual farm show.

“The government of the French Republic will firmly oppose any agreement that would sacrifice the interests of French and EU agriculture,” he added.

France is the single biggest beneficiary of the EU’s farm subsidies, worth more than 40 billion euros a year in total.

Negotiations on the Doha round have ground almost to a halt in Geneva this week as diplomats pored over the revised texts issued this month to pave the way for a ministerial meeting.

The Doha round was launched in November 2001 to boost the world economy and help developing countries lift themselves out of poverty by exporting more.

Any deal would involve rich countries opening up their food markets by cutting agricultural tariffs and subsidies in return for developing countries cutting industrial tariffs.

“The emerging countries think that they have only rights and no obligations,” Sarkozy said. The Doha talks, often declared dead, were revived last year, and trade ministers meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month declared their determination to meet in March or April with a view to completing the deal by the end of the year.

Sarkozy, warned that talks were threatening to stall again.

“We are drifting still further away from our initial objectives in this round,” he said, adding that these objectives need to be clarified for WTO negotiations to resume.

“I would rather we had an agreement but not at any price,” he said.

The latest proposals on the table, drawn up by the chairman of the agricultural negotiations at the WTO, would require the EU to go further than it originally planned with cuts to the bloc’s import tariffs for farm products.

France has repeatedly opposed the kind of concessions in agriculture that EU trade chief Peter Mandelson has said he is willing to consider if other members make similar sacrifices.

“Those who want to destroy the common agricultural policy don’t believe in Europe.

There is no reason to leave the field open for our American friends, U.S. farmers,” said Sarkozy.

“They don’t do it for us, why should we do it for them?”

France takes over the presidency of the European Union in July and Sarkozy said he wanted to take the offensive and launch a revamp of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) before a full overhaul of the policy scheduled in 2013.

—Reuters