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GENEVA, Switzerland (Reuters) -- The United States and the European Union swapped blame for the suspension of global trade talks on Tuesday, with Washington accusing Brussels of "false and misleading" statements.
World Trade Organisation (WTO) chief Pascal Lamy called a halt on Monday to a nearly five-year push for a free trade deal.
The EU and the United States, the world's biggest trade powers, have long accused one another of not making the kind of concessions to keep the talks on track. But after the collapse of the WTO process, the accusations have grown more heated.
EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson said on Monday that Washington produced no new proposals for cutting farm subsidies, prompting a rebuke from Washington on Tuesday.
"Yesterday's statement by the EU alleging that the United States failed to show flexibility ... and attempting to divert blame for the stalemate is false and misleading," the U.S. trade mission in Geneva said in a statement.
U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab has said Washington would have made a further offer on farm subsidy cuts had the EU and India been prepared to lower tariffs to let U.S. farmers export more.
The U.S. statement said the EU had offered "even less market access than originally thought" and the United States hoped "blamesmanship" by Brussels would not jeopardise the "few chances left" of reviving the talks.
Mandelson repeated his view that Washington was to blame.
"The U.S. has been asking too much from others in exchange for doing too little themselves," he told a news conference in Brussels. "Now the U.S. seems to be saying to the rest of world: we are right, you are isolated."
India and Brazil have also suggested Washington was most at fault for the failure of the WTO negotiations.
Mandelson insisted the EU's offer of an average cut of 50 percent to its farm import tariffs -- up from its previous offer of 39 percent -- "is hardly putting nothing on the table."
Aid campaign group Oxfam blamed both sides of the Atlantic.
"The intransigence shown by both Europe and the United States over the course of these talks is clearly the reason for their failure," said Luis Morago, the head of Oxfam in Brussels.
Mandelson on Tuesday proposed that several measures designed to help developing nations should be extracted from the now dormant Doha round.
They included help for poor countries to improve their export capacity, eliminating barriers in rich countries to the exports of the world's poorest and making it easier for developing countries to defend their interests at the WTO.
Mandelson also said he did not think the Doha row would impact transatlantic trade issues, such as a state aid dispute involving rival plane makers Airbus and Boeing.
"You can have the fiercest arguments about policy ... but then you can leave the room and have a perfectly amicable cup of tea or glass of wine and talk about other matters where you have shared interests," he said.
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