Negotiators from the U.S. and the European Union said their Indian and Brazilian counterparts offered nothing new to unblock trade talks that have dragged on for almost six years. On the other hand India and Brazil negotiators said that U.S. and EU were unwilling to cut farm aid and import duties on commodities.

Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath said:"It's the end of the day for G-4...Now it is for the full membership (of the WTO) to take the Doha round forward."

The G-4, which consisted of the EU, US, India and Brazil, was founded to bring the consensus among the developed and developing countries.

Nath said that developed countries wanted greater access to the markets in the developing world but refused to cut their trade distorting subsidies in agriculture.

Negotiations among four major World Trade Organization governments failed, which will hinder the efforts to produce an agreement that might bring billions of dollars to the global economy.

Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim and Indian Commerce Minister Kamal Nath said: "Negotiations didn't move an iota from the point we started at two years ago,'' U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns told journalists in the German city outside Berlin:"We stretched and they grabbed. I could have done cartwheels off the roof of this building and I'm still not sure I would have got a response.''

The failure of discussions repeated the last July's collapse, when negotiations among the four governments plus Japan and Australia ended without any positive outcome, making WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy to suspend talks.

Douglas Irwin, a historian of trade at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire said:"Over time these rounds have taken longer and longer. The issues are more complex than the old days when they were just talking about tariffs. The new issues are much more politically difficult.''

Amorim and Nath said talks derailed because the U.S. and the EU refused to improve their farm-aid offers. The numbers presented by the U.S. on domestic subsidies exceeded those demanded by the so-called G20 alliance of farm commodity- exporting nations while the EU's tariff-cut offers were insufficient, Amorim said. "Whatever the version others may try to offer, the major divergences appeared in agriculture,'' he added. "It was very clear at lunchtime and was said at lunch that it was useless to continue the discussion based on the numbers on the table. The decision not to continue with the negotiation was not ours.''

Nath said that the U.S. offered to cap its overall spending on trade-distorting domestic support at $17 billion. As leaders of the G20, which also includes China and Argentina, India and Brazil are pushing for an annual U.S. spending limit of no more than $15 billion.

"If this is to be called a development round, we need to correct the flaws in terms of subsidies,'' Nath added.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said President George W. Bush is "disappointed that there were countries that were trying to block a successful discussion,'' taking into account that U.S. "demonstrated considerable flexibility in these discussions.'' However,the U.S. will do its best to "push and find another way to get it done,'' Perino said. - Alla Harutyunyan for HULIQ.COM