US President George W. Bush's tarnished reputation as a free trader will be under close scrutiny at a key World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Mexico next week, amid doubts he will make the concessions needed for a global trade deal.

Bush has built up a mixed trade record since taking office nearly three years ago.

While touting free trade as the road to growth for rich and poor countries alike, he has also caved in to protectionist forces by slapping huge tariffs on imported steel and signing a six-year farm bill that boosted crop and dairy subsidies by 67 per cent or about US$6.4 billion annually.

"I think the president is instinctively a free trader with a very strong streak of doing what is politically advantageous," said Sherman Katz, a trade policy scholar at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

WTO member trade ministers open a crucial meeting in the Mexican resort of Cancun on September 10, hoping to make enough progress to keep world trade talks chugging towards a global deal by January 2005.

But moves like the US steel tariffs and the farm bill have raised questions in many developing countries about how much substance lies behind Bush's free trade rhetoric.

"We talk a good game about trade, but then we subsidize our domestic constituencies and fail to open our markets," said John Audley, director of the trade equity and development project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The United States has also been slow to comply with a number of adverse WTO panel rulings issued during Bush's presidency, including a high-profile spat with the European Union where the United States faces US$4 billion in possible trade retaliation for illegally subsidizing exports.

Bill Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council, a business group representing major US exporters, said Congress shared some of the blame for not complying with WTO rulings.

But he said Bush has contributed to an anti-WTO mood in Congress by not bringing more cases against dubious foreign trade policies, and that many politicians now view the WTO as biased against the United States.

Agriculture is at the heart of world trade talks, with both rich and poor countries eager for more market access around the world but at odds over how to accomplish that.

US farmers, who are expected to receive about US$19 billion in government subsidies this year, are refusing to give up those payments unless poor countries agree to open their markets by lowering agricultural tariffs.

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