U.S., Western Europe Tone Down Bickering Over Assistance to Soviets : Diplomacy: But the two sides remain hopelessly deadlocked on sputtering international trade talks.

By JOEL HAVEMANN

Dec. 22, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

BRUSSELS — The United States and Western Europe toned down their bickering over aid to the former Soviet Union on Saturday, but they remained hopelessly deadlocked on sputtering international trade talks.

At the semiannual meeting of top-level U.S. and European Community officials, Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers said the EC will participate next month in a conference in Washington to coordinate and expand international emergency assistance as the Commonwealth of Independent States emerges in place of the Soviet Union.

Appearing with Secretary of State James A. Baker III, head of the U.S. delegation at Saturday’s session here, Lubbers said, “I am very happy with the initiative of Secretary Baker.” The Dutch hold the EC’s rotating presidency.

Baker also struck a conciliatory tone. After a week of charges by Americans and Europeans that the other side was not doing enough, Baker declared that the EC “has been at the forefront of the assistance.”

Baker said he hoped the Washington meeting would add new donors to the roster of industrial nations whose aid to the Soviets has been coordinated by the EC.

“We hope nations in Latin America, in the Pacific, in the Persian Gulf will want to attend,” he said. One purpose is to put public pressure on oil-rich Arab nations to join in the effort to provide the commonwealth republics with food, energy, medical supplies and housing.

Before Saturday, a number of European countries, particularly France, had complained that the Washington meeting next month would merely duplicate an EC-led mechanism for funneling aid to the commonwealth.

“We’ve only received a negative response from one country,” a senior U.S. official told reporters traveling with Baker on the eve of Saturday’s meeting. “You may or may not know which country that is, and with that I will simply say au revoir. “

The U.S. official said that apart from Germany, EC nations have not pulled their share of the load. The EC, he said, has delivered only about 10% of the aid it promised, while the United States has shipped fully half of what it pledged.

The EC, meanwhile, released figures showing that the EC and its 12 member nations have pledged about $50 billion in assistance to the former Soviet Union, contrasted with about $4 billion for the United States. Germany alone is responsible for $35 billion of the EC total; of the other 11 EC nations, only Italy ($6 billion) has pledged more than the United States.

Jacques Delors, president of the EC Commission, the European Community’s Brussels-based executive branch, said after Saturday’s meeting with Baker that he had recommended that the Europeans attend the Soviet aid conference in Washington.

“There just aren’t enough resources” in Western Europe to meet all the Soviet needs, Delors said. Western Europe has surplus food, he said, but, using the example of infant food, he said, “Often the food needs do not correspond with what we have in our storage.”

On the virtually moribund 5-year-old negotiations by 108 nations to liberalize world trade, both U.S. and European officials voiced scarcely disguised gloom over prospects.

U.S. Trade Representative Carla Anderson Hills, asked if she thought the talks were dead, said only, “I think it’s too early to say.”

A week of talks between U.S. Agriculture Secretary Edward R. Madigan and EC agriculture commissioner Ray MacSharry ended Friday with the two sides no closer on the most divisive issue, the U.S. demand that the EC slash its generous subsidies to farmers.

“There are still substantial differences between the U.S. and the EC on a number of these points,” MacSharry said Saturday.

Neither the Europeans nor the Americans expressed any particular satisfaction with the draft trade accord released in Geneva the previous evening by Arthur Dunkel, executive director of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the group that supervises the international trading system.

Dunkel had hoped that his draft would nudge the disputants to resolve their differences, not only over agriculture but also in 14 other major negotiating areas. That did not seem to be happening.

Discussing Dunkel’s draft accord, Hills said: “There are parts that I think are acceptable and parts that are not.”

Dunkel’s draft called on the EC to reduce spending on agricultural export subsidies by 36% by 1999 from the average of the 1986-1990 period and to reduce domestic price supports for farmers by 20% by 1999.

Staff writers Norman Kempster in Brussels and Karen Tumulty in Washington contributed to this report.