It’s Back to Bickering on the Eve of GATT Deadline : Trade: After signs of progress fade, officials say the most that can be hoped for is an agreement to hold an extra day of talks.

Global trade talks, on the verge of breaking down, showed stirrings of progress Thursday, but quickly disintegrated again into the bickering that has marked every day of negotiations this week.

As the talks neared the scheduled deadline today, Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Julius Katz said he had “serious doubt” that they could produce any agreement that approached the ambitious proposals that began the round of negotiations four years ago. At most, officials say, they may be extended through Saturday.

Hopes for a deal had risen Thursday when the European Community announced that it would allow negotiation of crucial areas of its agricultural support program that it previously had put off limits. As soon as the closed session reconvened, however, the Europeans insisted upon returning to their earlier proposal, which had been rejected weeks ago by the United States and other agricultural exporters.

“We are still open to negotiations, but it is quite clear the other negotiating partners have to become more realistic about what we can accept in agriculture,” said John Cooney, spokesman for EC Agriculture Commissioner Ray MacSharry. “We can’t accept proposals that will damage the agricultural fabric of European society.”

In Santiago, Chile, where he is traveling with President Bush, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater was particularly pessimistic about the chances that the deadlock would be resolved.

“I can’t say we will get an agreement,” he said. “It’s very possible it will collapse.”

The negotiators’ principal aim has been to overhaul the trading system, known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which was established shortly after the end of World War II.

If the 107 participating nations succeed in significantly lowering barriers to free trade, they could boost the world economy by a staggering $4 trillion over the next decade, U.S. Trade Representative Carla A. Hills has said.

Failure could mean further deterioration of the system into blocs of nations that wage economic war upon each other, rather than following one set of rules. Moreover, nations pushing to break trade barriers argue that such a bout of protectionism would be all the more dangerous coming as the economies of many nations stand poised on the brink of recession.

A major goal is to expand the general trade agreement, which covers manufactured goods and materials, to include services--the industries such as banking, insurance and transportation that have been responsible for the bulk of the world’s economic growth in recent years.

The negotiators also hope to forge an agreement on the politically sensitive subject of trade in agriculture, an area that generally has been outside the scope of the overall trading agreement.

The 12-nation European Community, which is preparing to become a single market in 1992, has the world’s heaviest agriculture subsidies. The community insists that the programs are necessary to preserve Europe’s small but often inefficient farms.

Other countries contend that the European Community’s heavy agricultural subsidies have made it impossible for them to compete fairly with the Continent’s farmers. In many cases, the Europeans have managed to capture markets despite the fact that their costs of production are higher.

Developing countries had argued that they had no incentive to enter agreements allowing foreign service firms into their markets unless they were offered more opportunity to sell their farm exports.

Meanwhile, difficulties remain in other areas of the negotiations as well.

Among the contentious points is a European proposal to exempt all cultural products from the overall agreement. That would leave the EC free to impose quotas upon U.S.-made television programs and movies that now dominate the entertainment market in many European countries.

The United States has refused to go along with such an exclusion. By way of compromise, the Europeans have offered “to give further consideration to non-cultural” movies and television programming, a senior U.S. trade official said, speaking on the condition that he not be identified.

At a loss to specify what entertainment might be considered “non-cultural,” the official said acidly, “We’re going to finally break into their army training film market.”

Times reporter James Gerstenzang in Santiago, Chile, and Times researcher Isabelle Maelcamp in Brussels contributed to this report.