Gordon Brown will urge fellow European Union finance ministers today to take new initiatives to restart the Doha world trade negotiations, which have been stalled for three months with little sign of the deadlock being broken.

His call comes on the day that Vietnam hopes to be elected in Geneva as the 150th member of the World Trade Organisation, beating Ukraine and Russia.

The plea is the first step in a co-ordinated campaign to energise key players in the talks. Ed Balls, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, is to visit Tokyo while Alistair Darling, Trade and Industry Secretary, will lobby in India and Brazil.

Pascal Lamy, the WTO’s new Director-General, suspended talks indefinitely in July after a last-ditch emergency meeting collapsed. The talks foundered ultimately because the EU and the United States refused to agree deep cuts in farm subsidies demanded by food exporters and developing countries and in turn demanded concessions from developing countries on services, banking and industrial goods.

In an article in The Times yesterday, Mr Brown urged business to join governments in “a new push for a breakthrough”. He claimed that a far-reaching trade agreement was vital for the world economy and a cause comparable to creating the World Bank and the IMF. However, many developing countries believe that comprehensive trade rounds, clinched by last-minute bargaining, are usually against their interests.

The Chancellor’s campaign received received indirect support from Joseph Stiglitz, the influential former chief economist of the World Bank. Mr Stiglitz was quoted in a Paris newspaper as calling on the United States to make a more generous offer to its WTO partners by cutting domestic farm subsidies. He said that although EU subsidies were bigger, they had edged down while America’s had doubled.

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