Global trade relations slumped to a new low today after the US and Europe blamed India's efforts to protect its army of poor farmers for the collapse of the Doha round of World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks.

The latest negotiations — a nine-day last-ditch attempt to hammer out a deal at the WTO's headquarters in Geneva — ended after the US and India failed to agree on measures that would allow India to place tariffs on imported agricultural commodities in the case of a surge of such goods into the country.

China, which criticised a "selfish and short-sighted" US for yesterday's failure of the talks, was among those countries that claimed that the collapse of seven years of trade negotiations would raise doubts over international co-operation on critical issues, including climate change and food shortages.

Amid the recriminations, India insisted it was open to further talks. Kamal Nath, the Commerce and Industry Minister, said: "Everything rests on Pascal Lamy, the WTO Director-General. The WTO system remains intact."

However, Mr Nath gave no encouragement that India will relax its protectionist line.

Peter Mandelson, the EU Trade Commissioner, said: "In the end we tripped up over the level of a trigger for a single trade restraint measure, a rather small gap in figures, in which an irresistible force met an immovable object in the negotiating room, and I'm afraid the talks eventually broke down after all this time."

David Shark, the deputy head of the US mission to the Doha talks in Geneva, said that the actions of India and China had "thrown the entire Doha round into the gravest jeopardy of its nearly seven-year life."

He added: "All their invocations of development during the past years ring hollow when the major players threaten the development benefits already on the table that are absolutely vital to the vast majority of the membership."

There seems little chance of India softening its position on agricultural tariffs. The country's embattled coalition government must call a general election within the next year and has begun a campaign to win support from the two thirds of the country that relies on agriculture for a living — not least by introducing a massive multibillion pound debt-waver scheme for poor farmers.

Mr Nath said: "Our future talks will focus on the livelihood aspect of farmers."

The fallout from the talks has pitched the emerging economic powerhouses of India and China against their developed peers.

Xinhua, the Chinese state-controlled news service, today criticised rich nations for acting only in their own interests.

It claimed that the US and EU had failed to quash the demands of their farmers while demanding that poor countries open up markets for industrial goods and financial services.

"This selfishness and short-sighted behaviour has directly caused the failure of this WTO ministerial meeting, which will have a number of serious consequences," Xinhua said.

Chinese officials called the collapse of the talks "a tragic failure", but singled out the US for criticism.

Sun Zhenyu, China's permanent representative to the WTO, said: "The US has to remember that it is a development round, and if it covered all its sensitivities and kept threatening developing countries, I think we are going nowhere."

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