The Transatlantic Economic Council, set up last year to cut red tape and boost trade between the EU and the United States, meets in Brussels on Tuesday. EU Industry Commissioner Guenter Verheugen said earlier this week a solution would be found.

"On chickens, Verheugen assures us it will be fixed. It won't be fixed by Tuesday, but a fix will be in progress for a solution before the EU-U.S. summit -- which was the original promise -- in Ljubljana in June," the U.S. special envoy for European affairs, C Boyden Gray, told reporters.

"I have no reason to doubt what they say."

The ban has been in place since April 1997 because U.S. poultry producers use a low-concentration chlorine wash on chickens, a practice not permitted in the EU.

A European Commission spokesman said the EU's executive arm was committed to finding a solution.

"I am not in a position at this point in time to say when exactly and what exactly can be put on the table, it being a work in progress," the spokesman, Johannes Laitenberger, told a news briefing.

France is thought to be hostile towards lifting the ban.

"That is the question, whether they will ultimately block it," Boyden Gray said.

The United States sees resolving the chicken spat as an acid test on whether the TEC can deliver results.

There are already concerns that momentum behind the fledgling body will wane because of the wait for a new European Commission in November 2008 and a new U.S. president in January 2009.

"There will be a period of about a year when change on both sides can easily endanger this, but we hope to get beyond that," Boyden Gray said.