The European Union yesterday cast doubt on recent calls by the US and other countries for a rapid revival of the deadlocked Doha trade round, and questioned whether they were ready to work for the talks' success.

The European Union yesterday cast doubt on recent calls by the US and other countries for a rapid revival of the deadlocked Doha trade round, and questioned whether they were ready to work for the talks' success.

Mr Pascal Lamy, EU trade commissioner, said other governments were taking a more positive attitude because they feared the EU would not return to the talks after the failure of last month's World Trade Organisation meeting in Cancun.

"One can but hope that a valuable lesson is thereby being learned that multilateral negotiations need to be pushed along by everyone in the system and cannot be 'sponsored' by just one of the players," he told the Journal of Common Market Studies in London.

He warned against rushing to relaunch the talks, saying WTO members needed to think hard about why Cancun had failed.

He expressed surprise that the US and 20 other Pacific Rim countries had said last week they were ready to resume the talks on the basis of a text drafted by Mr Luis Ernesto Derbez, Mexico's foreign minister and chairman of the Cancun meeting.

Noting that many WTO members had attacked the document in Cancun, he said: "I am left to wonder, rather, what magic dust has been shaken over a text so roundly rejected in September, to find it so roundly endorsed in October."

He appeared to soften his tone slightly at a press briefing yesterday, saying that "if others want to move things forward, it can work".