WTO chief Pascal Lamy urged the organization's members to avoid playing the "blame game" over the collapse of trade liberalization talks and instead focus on how to restart the Doha round.
Lamy said it was clear that WTO members did not want to give up on the talks and that they needed to keep progress made in the past five years from unraveling.
"This is the time of hard thinking and deep reflection. It is the time for quiet thinking as opposed to megaphone diplomacy," Lamy told the WTO's governing general council on Thursday.
"I would urge all members to avoid the well-known blame game and instead use this period of reflection for serious and sober reflection on what is at stake here," he said.
Lamy seemed to be taking particular aim at the EU and the US, which have blamed each other for the suspension of the Doha round launched in 2001.
The EU says Washington derailed the talks by failing to offer deeper cuts in subsidies paid to farmers. The US, meanwhile, targeted Brussels' failure to ease access to its agricultural market for foreign goods.
"I did not propose any new deadlines or a date for resumption of activity in the negotiating groups, nor do I think that this is possible today," Lamy said.
"This can only come when the conditions exist to permit renewed progress, and this means changes in entrenched positions. The ball is clearly in the court of members," he said.
The whole process of agreeing to a binding treaty may have to be put on ice until after US presidential elections in 2008 because US President George W. Bush's "fast-track" authority to strike trade deals expires next year.
Without that measure, which requires an up or down vote by Congress without amendments, it would be much harder to gain US congressional approval.
The WTO talks collapsed only a week after world leaders pledged their support at the G-8 summit.
"I told them that they needed to revise their instructions to you and give you more flexibility," Lamy, who attended the G-8 meeting, told negotiators in Geneva.
"During the meeting there were some encouraging signs," Lamy said.
"However, these flexibilities failed to translate in significant changes in the negotiators' positions," he said.
Lamy -- director-general of the 149 member WTO -- suspended the negotiations on Monday after a meeting of ministers from the US, the EU, Japan, Australia, India and Brazil made it clear that differences over farm subsidies were unbridgeable.
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