Schwab said she had held a "healthy dialogue" with European Union trade chief Peter Mandelson here last week, but declined to elaborate on the result of the latest low-key meeting among top World Trade Organisation players.

"We are in the resuscitation stage of the (WTO's) Doha Round. It's down but it is not out," the US trade representative said in remarks to the American Enterprise Institute, a free-market think-tank.

The WTO's Doha Round of negotiations was suspended in July over an impasse between the EU and United States over agricultural reform. Major developing countries are also reluctant to open up their industrial and service markets.

There has been no formal session of WTO talks since then, but Schwab noted a series of "quiet contacts" among influential players including a meeting of agricultural exporters in Australia last month.

"I'm firmly convinced there will be a successful Doha Round outcome. What I can't tell you is the time-frame," Schwab said, noting that previous rounds of world trade talks had come back from the dead.

WTO chief Pascal Lamy told AFP last week that the 149 members of the Geneva-based club could still overcome their differences in time to clinch an ambitious agreement by the end of 2007.

For Schwab, complicating matters next year will be the expiry at the end of June of the administration's "fast-track authority" to negotiate trade deals, and the need for Congress to draft a new Farm Bill package of subsidies.

But she denied that protectionist resistance among US lawmakers could scupper any WTO deal, and played down the impact if opposition Democrats should retake control of one or both houses of Congress in November elections.