However, Europeans and Americans are sniping at each other on who should move first.

The US is demanding further cuts in EU farm tariffs while the EU says Washington must slash its costly domestic farm subsidy programme.

Both the EU and the US are insisting that rapidly-developing Asian and Latin American states must lower import tariffs in the industrial sector.

The most likely scenario, said Jean- Pierre Lehmann, the director of the pro-free trade Evian Group in Switzerland, would be a failure to reach an accord this year, with efforts postponed until at least 2009.

Lehmann warned that such a result would be a blow to global trade, leaving the system "impotent and irrelevant."