By Laura MacInnis

GENEVA, Nov 28 (Reuters) - Talks meant to pave the way for a breakthrough in the Doha world trade round are advancing well in some areas but seem stuck in others, leaving officials puzzling over when to invite ministers to step in.

Diplomats said it was unclear whether the seven-year-old World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations could be pushed to conclusion at a December ministerial meeting, as U.S. President George W. Bush and other leaders have called for.

At a meeting of the WTO's 153 members on Friday, New Zealand ambassador Crawford Falconer said the farming talks he mediates seemed to be veering toward consensus, though countries remained at odds on several tricky political issues.

He said that the latest week of negotiations in Geneva had been "reasonably positive, but not as positive as I would have liked or as positive as you would need."

The Group of 20 leading economies and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) have both in recent weeks called for a quick conclusion of the WTO's Doha round talks as a way to inject confidence in the shaky world economy.

A Doha round agreement would cut subsidies and tariffs on a wide range of traded goods and cross-border services, prying open food, fuel, transportation and other markets and therefore encouraging global economic activity.

But negotiations over the accord -- which were launched in Nov. 2001 at a summit in Qatar -- have struggled to overcome many countries' resistance to exposing politically powerful farmers and key industrial sectors to competition.

'CERTAIN CERTAINTY'

WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy has been looking for clear signs of progress in the talks among more junior officials before formally calling for a ministerial meeting, which many diplomats expect to start around Dec. 13 in Geneva.

European Union Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel said on Friday that WTO members needed to have "a certain certainty" that a Doha deal is within reach before sending their ministers to crunch the numbers.

But she said December may be the last opportunity for some time to push the long-sought accord to a conclusion.

"If we don't get a positive deal in December, it would be very difficult to imagine ministers coming back in the first six months of 2009," Fischer Boel told journalists in Brussels after a meeting of EU farm ministers.

The Bush administration leaves the White House in January and U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has not yet signalled whether he would alter his country's negotiating stance in the WTO talks, casting a long shadow over the Doha round.

Negotiations in Geneva this week skated over a number of sensitive issues, including a facility to shield poor-country farmers during crises, according to participants in those talks.

A dispute about that "special safeguard mechanism" caused a meeting of ministers in July to fail, with India squaring off against the United States and others who said the facility could close off existing markets instead of opening up new ones.

Brazil's WTO ambassador Roberto Azevedo said that in talks Thursday about that mechanism, "there wasn't exactly convergence or agreement, but there was no clear-cut rejection."

In other areas of the farming talks, Falconer said there remained lingering disagreements between members including the European Union, United States, Canada, Japan, India, Switzerland and various Latin America, African, Caribbean, and Pacific states on a range of technical issues.

Most centre on which and how many products countries can designate as "sensitive" to shield them from competition.

The chairman of parallel talks about manufactured goods, Switzerland's Luzius Wasescha, will brief Lamy and selected ambassadors on the state of his discussions at a Sunday meeting at the WTO's headquarters, on the shores of Lake Geneva.

A December ministerial may be called after that meeting. (Additional reporting by Jeremy Smith in Brussels; Editing by Matthew Jones)

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