WTO members are getting down to the technicalities of a new global trade deal, suggesting the right spirit of compromise to clinch agreement may at last be within reach, negotiators and officials said.

Swiss ambassador Luzius Wasescha, who chairs talks at the World Trade Organization on industrial goods, said after a week of meetings that he detected a changed mood, which was the prerequisite for movement in the long-running Doha negotiations.

He said members had finally started to talk about issues and proposals that had not been discussed so far.

"This is not the end of the final phase but the beginning of what might evolve into a final phase," he told a briefing.

WTO members have launched an intensive push to conclude the nine-year-old Doha round to free up world trade this year.

Trade ministers from Australia, Brazil, China, the European Union, India, Japan and the United States will meet on Jan. 28 on the sidelines of the annual gathering of political and business leaders in Davos to discuss the Doha talks.

A broader group of 20 or so trade ministers will meet in the Swiss resort the following day, also to review Doha.

The WTO's 153 members will then review progress back in Geneva on Feb. 2, one trade diplomat said.

Whether this year's efforts will in the end join a long list of missed deadlines, as differences between rich and emerging economies about opening up markets prove irreconcilable, remains to be seen.

But the effort to reach a deal is certainly being made, with negotiators and officials complaining of the punishing work schedule at WTO headquarters by Lake Geneva.

MORE DIRECTION
Negotiators said the long-deadlocked talks were at last showing some signs of movement but said it was much too soon to say they were finally on the right track.

"There's a long way to go. People are waiting to see what's going to happen in Davos next week," said a senior diplomat from a large developed economy.

"There's still some need for ministerial direction," agreed a diplomat from a medium-sized emerging country.

This week's industrial goods talks have focused on how to free up trade by removing non-tariff barriers -- safety and health standards and other rules that can be abused to block the flow of commerce.

Such barriers are of increasing importance now that tariffs themselves are fairly low in many countries.

One example is a proposal to set up a "horizontal mechanism" to defuse problems arising from the whole spectrum of non-tariff barriers without resorting to the WTO's more formal dispute settlement system.

The United States had previously opposed the idea altogether, but now accepts there is overwhelming support among other members and is trying to shape the proposal instead, said one trade official.

"In the horizontal mechanism we are already talking wording, which means the whole thing is moving," he said.

Wasescha said some members had held bilateral talks on a sectoral agreement in chemicals outside the meetings he chaired.

Sectorals, where a group of countries would sign up to a deal eliminating tariffs in a specific industrial sector beyond any overall cuts in duties that are agreed, are a central demand of the United States, which wants big emerging economies like China, Brazil and India to take part

The proposal was one of the issues over which the last push to reach agreement on Doha, in July 2008, foundered.

Washington says China, long sceptical towards sectorals, has signalled a willingness to discuss them.

Australia and the United Arab Emirates also put forward a proposal for a new sectoral agreement in raw materials, the trade official said. (Reuters)