The World Trade Organisation on Friday abandoned a March 31 deadline for an outline agreement on farm trade reform, casting a shadow over its overall "Doha Round" free trade negotiations.

Trade sources quoted the official leading the effort as saying the situation was now serious and implicitly calling on governments to step in to break the deadlock.

The farm talks -- partly covering the sensitive topic of subsidies, which can make or break governments -- are a vital element in the round, success in which has the potential to inject a needed boost into the ailing international economy.

Bitterness between the United States and major EU countries over the US-British intervention in Iraq, as well as anger the action has sparked in many developing countries, had already raised questions over the round's prospects.

The sources said WTO aide Stuart Harbinson, who had been trying to mould the conflicting positions of WTO countries into the framework for a pact, had decided that the target date for an outline farm agreement could not be met.

"The situation we are now in is very serious," they quoted him as telling a meeting of envoys to the 145-member trade body, although he added that the situation was "...by no means without some positive aspects."

Harbinson called for greater efforts in Geneva and in member state capitals to produce the compromises needed for accord on the modalities of how farm trade reform can be pushed through.

"Where do we go now?" asked one trade official musing aloud. "Frankly, we don't know."

Doha round

The round was launched to fanfare in the Qatari capital in November 2001 and is due to be wrapped up by the end of 2004.

Ministers from WTO countries are to meet in Cancun, Mexico, in September, for a mid-term progress review and were to have key elements of a final agriculture agreement on the table.

The farm talks began in early 2000, and were later brought into the overall strategy of bringing down tariff barriers and easing international trade in services while focusing on helping poorer countries catch up with the rich.

But they hit trouble largely over the future of massive subsidies received in varying forms by farmers in Europe, the United States and Japan, which developing countries say keep their farmers in poverty.

Harbinson had the task of putting together a paper setting out the basic aims of reform -- including the speed and extent of cuts in farm support -- through a synthesis of all views, called the modalities.

But the one basic document he produced in mid-February was heavily criticised across the board -- as being too radical or too timid, too detailed or too vague, as offering too much to poor countries or too little.

Europe's farmers, inside and outside the 15-nation European Union, have vowed to defend their living standards and way of life, and according to a Swiss farm union leader plan to protest at the WTO on Saturday.

Many of them, backed by heavily subsidised rice producers in Japan and South Korea who have powerful political pull in their capitals, want agriculture taken right out of the round.