Ministers from the 148-nation WTO, their dream of a global trade deal imperilled by sharp regional differences, are about to mount a fresh bid in Hong Kong for the consensus needed to see the agreement implemented next year.
Their long-awaited December 13-18 conference was originally billed as a key stage in the four-year-old Doha Round of negotiations to reduce barriers to world trade and spur growth in developing countries.
Hong Kong was to see approval of a framework multilateral accord that would need just a little more fine-tuning before taking effect near the end of 2006.
But in recent weeks members of the World Trade Organisation have resigned themselves to watered down goals in the face of persistent disagreement on two critical issues - the extent of cuts in import tariffs and government support for agriculture and the opening of industrial markets.
The plan now is to draft a "road map," highlighting what has to be done next year, and to hold another meeting in March to keep the Doha Round, launched in the Qatari capital in late 2001, on track.
"We will have blueprint coming out of Hong Kong," US Trade Representative Rob Portman said recently on CNBC Television.
"We're not as far along as I'd hoped we'd be ... Hong Kong was supposed to be more of a milestone that it is ended up being."
For WTO Director General Pascal Lamy there is now a danger that important tariff and subsidy proposals already put forward could be scrapped if Hong Kong founders.
"What is already on the table can translate into a good result for development," he said late last month.
"It would certainly be disastrous if what we have disappears because we fail to move the negotiations forward."
Ministers coming to Hong Kong are anxious to avoid a repeat of the high-profile WTO conferences that collapsed in bitter discord in Seattle in 1999 and the Mexican resort of Cancun in 2003.
In the hot seat are the European Union, accused of failing to offer deep enough reductions in farm import duties, and the United States, accused of having been slow to propose reductions in agricultural export subsidies.
And both of the world's largest trading powers are in turn criticised for skewing trade against poor nations, their import barriers and government subsidies seen as making it impossible for poor farmers to compete effectively on the world stage.
At the same time, current proposals put forward by the EU and the United States have triggered problems at home, with France in particular slamming plans by EU negotiators to cut Europe's farm support.
Their US counterparts must contend with a powerful domestic farm lobby reluctant to see the end of decades of generous government assistance.
Japan, Switzerland and a handful of other rich nations that want to protect key parts of their farm sectors have also warned they cannot afford deep cuts in import barriers.
Meanwhile, powerful emerging market countries such as Brazil and India have resisted EU calls for stepped-up talks on easing restrictions on trade in industrial goods and services, such as banking, until the agriculture question is settled.
Other poor nations in the 79-member African, Caribbean and Pacific group are wary of losing preferential trade accords with the European Union under far-reaching trade liberalisation.
Further clouding prospects for success in Hong Kong are demands from cotton-producing countries in Africa for sharp reductions in subsidies offered by Washington to US cotton growers.
Under such circumstances, activists say developing countries are right to be wary.
Celine Charveriat of the advocacy group Oxfam insisted that pressure for a comprehensive trade deal "must not be used as a smokescreen for forcing poor countries to agree to dramatic and premature market opening."
EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson insists that governments must also discuss an "itemised development package."
Officials have said it could be based on an EU initiative that gives goods from the poorest countries tariff- and quota-free access to Europe.
But India's Commerce Minister Kamal Nath maintains that the Doha Round is meant to help all, and not only some, developing countries. He has warned that initiatives for just the poorest are an attempt to "bisect and dissect" the developing world.
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