Trade Talks With EC Fail in Blow for Bush : Commerce: The President had hoped for a dramatic breakthrough ahead of Election Day. No new negotiations are scheduled.

U.S. trade officials on Wednesday announced the breakdown of talks aimed at resolving a bitter trade dispute with Europe that has stymied a six-year effort to rewrite the rules of world trade.

The breakdown is a setback for President Bush.

American officials said technical-level talks being held with the 12-nation European Community in Brussels had broken off with both sides far apart. They said no further talks had been scheduled.

The White House had hoped that a dramatic breakthrough in the long-stalled Uruguay Round of free-trade talks would boost Bush’s reelection effort in the closing days of the campaign.

An agreement would have let the President point to the deal as evidence of his Administration’s role in lowering barriers to sales of American products overseas.

On Sunday, U.S. Trade Representative Carla Anderson Hills had said that a breakthrough could come “in a matter of days.”

But on Wednesday, officials said the talks had shown a widening of the gulf between the two sides on both the question of farm subsidies and a related dispute with Europe on oil seed subsidies.

“On the Uruguay Round, the positions of the European Community have retrogressed, so the gap is as wide as it was previously,” said one U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The European Community has proposed non-solutions. Progress has been replaced by retrenchment.”

Another U.S. official, also requesting anonymity, refused to rule out the possibility that an agreement could still be reached before the Nov. 3 presidential election.

While officials refused to provide details on negotiating positions, the strongest opposition to resolving the farm subsidy dispute has come from France, where farmers are militantly opposed to losing subsidy payments.

The United States had been demanding deep cuts in the subsidies that rich countries pay their farmers on the grounds that these payments distorted world trade and cost more-efficient American farmers overseas sales.