(GENEVA) - European Union Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson said Tuesday it was "heartbreaking" that a bid to conclude a global trade pact collapsed due to one single element in a package of proposals.

"Of all the failures they could have tripped up on, to have the level... to do with (the SSM) trade restraint measure and a small gap in numbers managing to provoke this failure is... absolutely heartbreaking," he told reporters after talks broke down.

Delegates to WTO talks, which broke down earlier Tuesday, said negotiations stumbled on proposals for measures to protect poor farmers that would impose a special tariff on certain agricultural goods in the event of an import surge or price fall.

Visibly emotional immediately after the talks, Mandelson admitted that it was a "collective failure," but added: "I'm afraid that on this subject an irresistible force met an unmovable object in the negotiating room and the rest is history."

In a news conference later, he assessed that with political will a deal could have been done.

"We were 95 percent or thereabouts on the way," he said.

However, "we broke on an issue which should not have tripped us up. It may seem a small issue, but its important because it's about agriculture and it's a development issue".

"We worked for success, we had failure pushed upon us," he added.

Calling it a "profound disappointment" for the EU, he said that while there were doubts on the EU's commitment on agriculture, "we never fell short, we always delivered."

He pointed out that EU agriculture has undergone reform since 2001, a move, which he said "has not been matched by the United States", where a "reactionary" mammoth 290-billion-dollar farm bill including subsidies has been passed by Congress.

"The only way to displace the Farm Bill was to do the Doha deal... and that's what we're losing as a result of our failure in Geneva," he said, after earlier predicting that it would be countries that most needed help that would be hit hardest by the failure.

The consequences "will fall disproportionately on those who are most vulnerable in the global economy, those who needed the chances, the opportunities most from a successful trade round," he added.

The world's economic superpower, the United States, and India, one of the world's biggest emerging economies, were sharply divided over the SSM -- the special safeguard mechanism.

Some developing countries such as India wanted the mechanism to kick in at a lower import surge level than has been proposed in order to protect their millions of poor farmers from starvation.

Others wanted it to take effect at a higher rate so as not to hurt exporters.

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