"This was a very bad weekend for those goals," UN Deputy Secretary General Mark Malloch-Brown said, after the meeting at the World Trade Organisation failed to overcome long-standing deadlock between 149 trading nations.

The troubled five year-old talks on the Doha Round, which are already behind the original schedule, are meant to try to harness freer trade in agriculture, industrial goods and services largely to boost developing nations.

"Rural and urban incomes in developing countries took a prospective hit in terms of future growth with the outcome of the talks on the weekend," Malloch-Brown told journalists.

"A Doha trade round is absolutely critical -- a trade round on the right terms to make it a genuine development round."

Growth in Asia in recent years has demonstrated the value of trade in helping to raise domestic growth, and those countries have been at the forefront of progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals in 2015, he explained.

"The statistics speak for themselves: countries that are integrated into the world economy grow faster than those that are not," Malloch-Brown said.

"So this trade round was enormously important for the achievement of the MDGs," he added.

The goals laid out by world leaders in 2000 include a call to halve extreme poverty over 1990 levels and ensure that all children have primary education, as well as pledges to tackle infectious disease and increase aid.