Geneva, July 30 :

The freeze in global trade talks could turn out to be deeper than a similar crisis that gripped the system in 1990, because of acrimony flying between the world’s two biggest trading powers, the EU and the US, analysts say.

The collapse of a meeting between the six most influential WTO members — Australia, Brazil, the European Union, India, Japan and the United States — last Monday has revived uncomfortable memories of the rift that opened up in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) 16 years ago.

Like today, five years of talks foundered on a transtlantic spat over agriculture.

However, after two years of trying, the bickering sides in the Uruguay Round were cajoled and coaxed back to the negotiating table to create the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which was set up in 1995.

Over the past week, the optimists have reached back in history to predict a gradual resumption of the Doha Round’s bid to pare down barriers to trade in agriculture, industrial goods, and services.

“If you look at the history of the Uruguay Round, it stopped and started a number of times,” US agriculture secretary Mike Johanns commented as the EU, Brazil and India traded barbs with Washington over who was to blame for the failure.

Ambassadors at the WTO — especially those from the poorest countries that are meant to benefit most from the Doha Round — have raised hopes for a swift return to business. Big business, a powerful lobby in many a country, has also signalled its disappointment at the suspension of the trade talks.

“Historically, it has been the multilateral trading system that has generated global economic growth. We will continue to fight for that system,” said Marcus Wallenberg, chairman of the International Chamber of Commerce and GM offshoot Saab.

However, some of those who lived through the troubled history of the near six-decade-long effort to expand free trade have a less rosy view of the future.

David Ha-rtridge was the director of negotiations during the troubled Uru-guay Round into the 1990s, the ei-ghth of its kind since multilateral trade system was created in 1947.