Key ministers failed today to achieve a breakthrough in troubled farm talks, but agreed to meet again next week on the issue critical to reaching a global trade deal by an end-year deadline.
The United States, whose offer of deep subsidy cuts had appeared to give a fillip to the struggling negotiations, blamed the European Union for the lack of progress, saying it had failed to respond with a similar offer on tariffs.
"I'm disappointed...there has been no significant moves on farm market access," US Trade Representative Rob Portman told journalists following three days of meetings in Switzerland.
But ministers from the European Union, United States, Brazil, India and Australia, who had been spearheading the search for accords in agriculture, plan to meet again in Geneva next Wednesday afternoon and Thursday.
"We will be back next week," said a spokesman for EU Farm Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel. Under intense pressure, the 25-nation EU did give some ground on the tariff issue, but US and developing country negotiators said that it fell far short of what was needed.
However the United States has not escaped all criticism. While welcoming the subsidy offer, some developing country negotiators demanded more detail on how future US farm aid would be distributed.
EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson acknowledged the lack of a breakthrough, but said at a news conference:. "I think that in the last couple of days we crossed some thresholds ... we have moved from stand-off but without reaching trade-offs."
The 148-member WTO needs to agree a blueprint in Hong Kong in December for the final stage of its Doha Round, but negotiations are struggling with a host of issues, of which agriculture is the most pressing.
Failure could kill the round, which has been touted as capable - if successful - of giving a multibillion-dollar boost to the world economy and lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
In a new report this week, the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said a new free trade pact would benefit all nations except a handful of developing countries, mainly in Africa.