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 Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim warned on Tuesday that global trade talks would fail if members of the World Trade Organization try to revise positions they had reached last July.
The WTO is considering whether to hold a ministerial-level meeting in Geneva in coming days to advance talks that collapsed in July over safeguards to protect domestic farmers from a flood of food imports.
But that meeting produced preliminary agreement in several areas, including an outline of possible tariff reductions on manufactured products.
"Any attempt to rebalance the July package will result in failure," Amorim said.
The United States wants Brazil, India and China to commit to taking part in deals eliminating tariffs in individual sectors such as chemicals but the big emerging countries say participation must be voluntary.
"Any attempt at this time to convert the basis of sectoral talks from something voluntary to obligatory ... we better not go to Geneva at all," Amorim said in Brazilian capital Brasília.
As a key farm goods exporter Brazil has played a key role in the talks, attempting to forge a common front of developing countries in the so-called G-20 group.
The latest revisions of two papers including what could become the formulas for cutting tariffs and trade-distorting agricultural subsidies in a final deal were issued on December 6, 2008. They are the outcome of the latest discussions in negotiation groups and would be a focus of crucial talks if a representative group of ministers return to Geneva later in December.
According to the WTO site the two documents are revisions of drafts previously circulated in July 2007, and May, February and July 2008 and are the result of WTO member governments' latest positions in the discussions since September 2007, one of the most intensive periods of negotiations since the Doha Round talks began in 2001.
The latest drafts also try to capture agreement reached tentatively on some subjects when a group of ministers came to Geneva in July 2008 and tried but failed to reach agreement on these issues.
The texts are agriculture negotiations chairperson Ambassador Crawford Falconer's and non-agricultural market access (NAMA) chairperson Luzius Wasescha's latest draft "modalities."
The papers are the chairs' assessment of what might be agreed for the formulas for cutting tariffs and trade-distorting agricultural subsidies, and related provisions. After these "modalities" have been agreed, members will apply the formulas to their tariffs and agricultural subsidies.
The two papers were circulated at about the same time because members link the two subjects. Members now intend to move to a new phase where these areas of the Doha Round can be negotiated in comparison with each other with the hope that agreement can be reached later in December 2008, when a representative group of ministers could be in Geneva.
As well as reaching agreement within each subject, members also want to negotiate an acceptable balance between the depths of cuts (the "level of ambition") in agricultural and non-agricultural tariffs and agricultural subsidies as well as the size of cuts that they desire in each area.
Drawn from WTO member governments' positions over several months of the negotiations, these are not "proposals" from the New Zealand and Swiss ambassadors in the sense that "proposals" are normally understood. In other words, these are not the chairs' opinions of what would be "good" for world agricultural and non-agricultural trade, but what might be accepted by all sides in the negotiations.
Mercopress
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The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.
In spite of the warning, WTO talks will fail, because there was no past consensus.Waste of Tax Payers money to continue with the illusion. Late ACM called Mercosul as "Merdasul". I wonder what fashionable name he would have coined for the Doha Round of "Talks". Too bad the old man is dead and forgotten.