Geneva ? After coming tantalizingly close to a historic trade deal, World Trade Organization talks collapsed Tuesday in a dismaying blow to seven years of efforts to open up the global economy.

Once promised as a recipe for lifting millions of people out of poverty, the end to nine days of high-level talks left no new trade openings for farmers and manufacturers, no global economic boost and no grand deal for Third World development.

It was by all accounts a disaster.

“This is a very painful failure and a real setback for the global economy when we really needed some good news,” said Peter Mandelson, the European Union’s trade commissioner.

His disappointment was shared by top negotiators from the United States, Brazil and India, who have played leading roles since the World Trade Organization launched its current trade round in the Qatari capital of Doha in 2001.

While the talks have struggled before, this failure was perhaps the most devastating. Faced with global unrest from rising food prices, credit problems from shaky financial markets and the threat of economic downturn, negotiators hoped that a deal this week to open farm and industrial markets would go some way to alleviating these problems.

It was all the more disappointing because the talks made greater progress than they had in years on issues such as farm subsidies and manufacturing tariffs – which were responsible for scuttling previous high-level trade efforts. The talks hit a snag over an obscure “safeguard” for protecting agricultural producers in the developing world from a sudden surge in imports or drop in commodity prices.

While farm import safeguards currently exist in rich and poor countries, they are rarely used and reflect only a minute portion of the billions of dollars in manufacturing, farm and services gains the WTO’s Doha trade round was supposed to create.

“In the face of global food price crisis, it is ironic that the debate came down to how much and how fast could nations raise their barriers to imports of food,” said U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab, who resisted attempts by China and India to ensure a loophole for developing countries allowing them to increase farm tariffs as part of an agreement.

Schwab called the measure “blatant protectionism.”

India’s trade minister, who was blamed by a number of rich and poor countries for his intransigence this week, said the U.S. demands were unreasonable.

“It’s unfortunate in a development round we couldn’t run the last mile because of an issue concerning livelihood security,” Kamal Nath told reporters.

The most significant WTO meeting in three years aimed to pull off a broad compromise that, in short, would have let poor countries sell more produce to rich countries while giving the U.S., 27-nation EU and Japan new chances for their manufacturers and service providers in the emerging markets of Brazil, China and India.

This was the tradeoff that eluded a WTO ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mexico, in 2003, and Hong Kong two years later. Gatherings in Geneva in 2006 and Postdam\\, Germany, last year also failed to produce the breakthrough, but pressure was higher because of the likelihood that the United States and other key trading powers would lose interest amid administration changes over the next couple of years.