Key players in global trade are said to be willing to cut farm subsidies, open up markets and support poorer countries, the visiting World Trade Organization (WTO) director-general has said.

Local English broadsheet Daily News on Monday quoted the WTO chief Pascal Lamy as saying in an exclusive interview that the global trade body is getting good signals from major trading nations.

Lamy is on a two-day visit to Tanzania starting on Sunday to seek consensus for the restart of the stalled negotiations of what has come to be known as the Doha Round.

Lamy told the newspaper that the United States, the European Union and Japan had unambiguously shown desire to reduce farm subsidies while Brazil, India and China had shown flexibility on a number of issues.

"It is our hope that a major breakthrough will be reached sooner than later," said Lamy, who took the WTO office on Sept. 1 of 2005 for a four-year term.

On arrival at Dar es Salaam, Lamy described his East African tour that also includes Kenya as an effort to discuss how the WTO and East African countries could work together to bring the Doha negotiations that collapsed in July last year to a successful conclusion that would secure developmental benefits to Africa.

The Doha Round, or the Doha Development Agenda, was launched in 2001 in the Qatari capital with the aim of alleviating poverty through fairer trade conditions so as to re-balance the global trading system in favor of developing countries.

Source: Xinhua