The United States launched a fresh attack on European Union trade policies Wednesday, as the World Trade Organisation (WTO) urged negotiators to set aside petty squabbles and address the big picture.

WTO chief Pascal Lamy told a conference of farm exporters in Australia that he was forced to suspend WTO liberalisation talks last July because negotiators for the 149 member nations had lost their sense of perspective.

"The negotiations unravelled because far too many negotiators focused on the small picture, forgetting the bigger one," he said.

"It is this sense of proportion that, in my view, is missing," he told the Cairns Group gathering being held in this resort town near the Great Barrier Reef in a desperate effort to get the global talks back on track.

The 18-nation Cairns Group of agricultural exporters has been joined for the meeting by senior US, EU, Japanese and WTO officials in a specially-expanded conference.

Lamy's appeal coincided with a joint broadside against the EU from US Trade Representative Susan Schwab and US Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns on the sidelines of the Cairns meeting.

US Trade Representative Susan Schwab singled out EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson for not bothering to attend the meeting in Australia, saying "you don't get a yes by saying no".

"It would have been useful for the trade commissioner to be here," Schwab told AFP in an interview.

Johanns, also at the interview, said the EU needed to stop lecturing other countries about their responsibilities and offer an ambitious contribution to WTO talks.

"With all due respect, they're very good at telling everybody else what they need to do but what we really need them to do is to step up to the level of ambition that is called for in this round and open their markets and cut their subsidies," he told AFP.

Both Schwab and Johanns stressed that the United States had not given up on the Doha Round of WTO negotiations, which were suspended last July amid a row between the US and EU over agricultural protection.

Schwab said the US wanted to slowly build a "coalition of the open-minded" pushing for a global trade deal, rather than re-opening formal WTO talks prematurely and pressure for an immediate breakthrough.

"It is the quiet conversations, it is the 'what if?' conversations, it is reaching out, it is building coalitions of the open-minded -- not coalitions of the like-minded -- to generate ideas and new suggestions and proposals.

"At some point, one would hope that if the key players come to the table with flexibility, we'll find the convergence that has eluded us."

Lamy also backed a softly-softly approach to reviving the talks, in contrast to leaders such as Britain's Tony Blair, who has proposed a major international summit to give a "decisive push" toward a global free trade deal.

"I would not advise going back to the (talks) without enough assurances through bilateral contacts, quiet diplomacy and compromise ... so that when, or if, we officially resume, it's on the basis that there has been enough pre-cooking (for success)," Lamy said.

The WTO director-general said a WTO deal which had the potential to boost world economic growth and alleviate poverty should not be allowed to fail for relatively minor reasons.

"It is pretty unfortunate that the negotiations broke down over a few thousand tonnes of beef, a few thousand tonnes of poultry and a few billion dollars of trade-distorting subsidies," Lamy said.

"The bigger picture, again, went by unnoticed."

Lamy said negotiators had until mid-March next year to provide a credible blueprint for a deal that would persuade the US Congress to extend the Bush administration's overall trade negotiating mandate beyond mid-2007.

The Doha Round of talks was launched in the Qatari capital in 2001 and was supposed to deliver a global agreement on reducing agricultural and industrial trade barriers by 2004 but dragged on until its suspension in July.

The EU's ambassador to the WTO, Carlo Trojan, said the Doha Round was "still do-able".

"There has been an excessive focus on agriculture, both from the demanding countries and the delivering countries," he said. "We're in a paradoxical situation: we're still pretty close to an agreement"

However, Australian Prime Minister John Howard said the Doha talks "were not looking good" but the Cairns Group would persevere maintain the battle to free up world trade.