Is there a deal or not?

After a long night, the Associated Press is prematurely reporting that a trade deal has been reached: Negotiators at the World Trade Organization have agreed on a sweeping trade deal dismantling barriers to trade in agriculture, manufacturing and services, India's trade minister said Sunday.... Delegates met overnight into Sunday and managed to overcome differences on a draft text. A final agreement on an exact date was expected later in the day, Indian Trade Minister Kamal Nath said. "We'll have a definite date," he said. "We have a deal." Nath said that ending agricultural export subsidies by 2013 would be acceptable to India, one of the leading developing nations and a key player in the rules-setting WTO. CNN reports that there's just one sticking point remaining: Just one issue remained unresolved as World Trade Organization negotiators worked to reach a series of agreements to end agricultural, manufacturing and service trade barriers, according to a WTO official Sunday. The issue yet to be settled is the date for ending export subsidies, WTO press officer Emmanuelle Ganne told CNN. This sounds great... except I just talked to an EU official who's making the rounds in the press room and apparently that sticking point ain't going anywhere for a while. The sticking point remains ending agricultural export subsidies, and that the EU did put forward 2013 as the end date. The problem was that at the last minute Brazil pushed for an earlier date -- and it all fell apart. My hunch is that Humpty Dumpty has a decent chance of being put together again -- I think the EU is trying to tell the Brazilians and others it's either 2013 or no deal, and I suspect the Brazilians will take what they can get. One possible explanation for Nath's statement is that the Indians are trying to publicly signal to the Brazilians to accept the deal on the table. That said, the EU folks are exceedingly grumpy right now, so I wouldn't place a great deal of faith in that hunch. The hard deck for the Ministerial will be 5 AM Hong Kong time on Monday (4 PM Sunday EDT). That's when the Convention Center here has to prep for its next booking. A side note: one of the amusing features of being in the press room is seeing the pack mentalityof journalism in action. If a sufficient number of journalists are congregating around person A, then that group starts acting like a powerful magnet attracting the individual iron fillings of other journalists. Sometimes this makes a great deal of sense -- as when the EU tspokesman contradicts the India statement. Sometimes it makes no sense -- as when a great throng materialized to get their hands on... a schedule of the Ministerial's closing ceremonies. No one gives a flying fig about that. UPDATE: Both the AP and Reuters are reporting that there's a deal. The AP story has more details: WTO negotiators reached a breakthrough on the most contentious issue of their six-day talks, agreeing that wealthy countries would eliminate farm export subsidies by 2013, according to a final draft of the accord. The deal paves the way for a broader agreement to cut trade barriers across various sectors. The breakthrough, coming after all-night negotiations, appeared to save the World Trade Organization meeting from an embarrassing collapse provided the final draft is approved by all 149 member nations and territories who are meeting later Sunday. The 2013 date was a key demand of the European Union, which held out against intense pressure from Brazil and other developing nations to phase out a significant proportion of its farm export subsidies by 2010. Developing nations say the government farm payments to promote exports undercuts the competitive advantage of poor farmers. The revised text also sets April 30, 2006, as a new deadline to work out formulas for cutting farm and industrial tariffs and subsidies - a key step toward forging a sweeping global free trade treaty by the end of next year.... The final draft also calls on wealthy nations to allow duty-free and quota-free privileges to at least 97 percent of products exported by the so-called least developed countries by 2008. In addition, the draft retained an earlier proposal that rich countries to eliminate all export subsidies on cotton in 2006.