The European Union (EU) has offered a plan to reduce tariffs and push the WTO’s current round of negotiations forward, including special trade deals for developing countries, the Wall Street Journal Europe reports.

The plan, which calls for the elimination of peak, or high, tariffs, focuses on industrial goods and doesn't include politically sensitive agricultural markets, which Europe lavishly subsidises. Previous trade rounds, the EU said, have created a "confused web of uneven tariff structures" that must be made more transparent, easier to administer and less likely to shelter domestic interests.

"We will need to heavily take into account what developing countries want," EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy said. "The US and the EU alone can't make a decision" as he said they have in the past.

To reduce tariffs, the EU proposed what trade experts call a compression mechanism. The 15-nation bloc suggested that WTO members eliminate peak tariffs on all nonagricultural goods, thereby compressing the range of duties. But Europe said that with trade ministers at Doha, Qatar, last year committing themselves to helping developing nations, "even bolder approaches are needed that target products of specific interest to developing and least developing countries".

Saying that rich nations needed to shoulder the burden of helping poor countries gain access to global markets, the EU called for the elimination of export restrictions on raw materials and for deep cuts on tariffs for textiles and footwear. In addition, the EU said the developed world, as well as the best-off developing countries, should unilaterally eliminate all tariffs from the least developed countries by May 2003.