World Trade Organization ministers are preparing for a September 10 to 14 conference in Cancun, Mexico to salvage the negotiations, bogged down by deep-seated disputes, especially over farm trade.

US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick said Washington was prepared to pursue its own free-trade agenda if the WTO proved unable to do its job.

President George W. Bush was committed to free trade, he said, noting that Bush had signed legislation Wednesday to implement free trade deals with Chile and Singapore.

"We will find countries that want to open up markets with the United States," Zoellick told a conference here.

"I hope they will be in the WTO. But if they are not, we are not stopping. We are moving with the countries that are willing to go," he warned.

His opposite number in Europe, European Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy, speaking via satellite, said a failure to complete the agenda, launched in Doha, Qatar in November 2001, would have economic repercussions.

"Cancun is a mid-term review and the big decision down there is whether or not we have done 50 percent of the road so that we are we confident enough that with a big push we can do the remaining 50 percent by the end of next year," Lamy said.

"If we say we can do that and we do it, it is terribly good news for the world economy," he said.

But "if we say we can do it and we cannot do it at the end of the day, it is going to be bad news for the world economy and for the world trading system."

Zoellick and Lamy broadly agreed that goals in Cancun would be:

-- To develop a framework for negotiations in agriculture, goods and services, without putting in the exact figures for subsidies or tariff cuts.