Top WTO Powers To Meet In January To Discuss Stalled Global Trade Talks

GENEVA (AP) - Ministers from the WTO's most influential powers will meet early next year to make their first joint attempt at reviving global trade talks since their collapse last summer, officials said Monday.

Top representatives of the United States, the European Union, Japan, Australia, India and Brazil are among those expected to gather on the sidelines at the World Economic Forum's annual four-day meeting of global leaders in Davos, Switzerland. Pascal Lamy, director-general of the World Trade Organization, also has been invited to attend the meeting at the end of January.

The gathering will be the first for top trading powers since five years of commerce liberalization talks over farm subsidies and tariffs, as well as barriers to the import of manufactured goods, came to a halt in July.

The U.S. and the 25-nation EU, the world's two biggest traders, blamed each other for the failure.

Mark Adams, a spokesman for the forum, said ''it will be an informal meeting of ministers, focusing particularly on the WTO talks.''

Lamy, a former EU trade chief who has steered the Geneva-based WTO since September 2005, has been traveling the world to build support for restarting negotiations. Earlier this month, he brought the organization's 149 members together for the first time since July to tell them they could resume technical meetings on lowering barriers to farm and manufactured goods trade.