An April deadline for World Trade Organization (WTO) members to reach a key deal on trade in farm and industrial goods has obviously been missed, WTO Director- General Pascal Lamy said on Monday.

"There will not be modalities for agriculture and industrial tarrifs by the end of April," Lamy told reporters following a meeting of WTO delegation heads.

The modalities refer to precise formulas for cutting farm and industrial tariffs and subsidies, and the April 30 target for achieving the modalities has been considered crucial for the overall target of concluding the Doha Round by the end of the year.

The Doha Round, named for the Qatari capital where it was launched in 2001, aims to tear down barriers to commerce and using trade to boost the economies of poor nations.

Lamy said, however, that the talks were not deadlocked, and there was no need to trade blames and "cry over the missed deadline."

He said negotiations had actually been moving forward in the recent past, notably in the last agriculture week that ended on Friday.

But the pace of progress has been too slow, and "what we need is more determination and clearer sense of purpose," he said.

Lamy said WTO ambassadors discussed the next steps for the negotiations at the meeting on Monday.

All the ambassadors agreed that there was no need for an immediate new deadline to be fixed.

But Lamy warned that it was impossible to postpone the modalities on agriculture and NAMA (non-agriculture market access) to the end of July, a further deadline for WTO members to reach agreement on other aspects of the Doha Round, notably service and rules.

The end of July would be too late and that "would guarantee failure," he said.

He called on WTO members to accelerate their talks on agriculture and NAMA modalities and finish the major part of the work before June, when the World Cup would start in Germany and might distract the negotiators' attention.

Lamy added that he had no plan to convene a ministerial meeting of WTO members in Geneva this week or next, as the time was not ripe.

"In order to make productive use of the direct involvement of ministers in the negotiations, we need to put well-developed texts before them for decision, and these texts are not yet there," he said.

"From now on, the process to reach modalities will be continuous,Geneva-based, and focused on texts - and we should aim at finishing this work in a matter of weeks rather than months," he stressed.

Source: Xinhua