Their long-awaited December 13-18 conference was originally billed as a key stage in the four-year-old Doha Round of negotiations to reduce barriers to world trade and spur growth in developing countries.

Hong Kong was to see approval of a framework multilateral accord that would need just a little more fine-tuning before taking effect near the end of 2006.

But in recent weeks members of the World Trade Organisation have resigned themselves to watered down goals in the face of persistent disagreement on two critical issues -- the extent of cuts in import tariffs and government support for agriculture and the opening of industrial markets.

The plan now is to draft a "road map," highlighting what has to be done next year, and to hold another meeting in March to keep the Doha Round, launched in the Qatari capital in late 2001, on track.

"We will have blueprint coming out of Hong Kong," US Trade Representative Rob Portman said recently on CNBC Television.

"We're not as far along as I'd hoped we'd be ... Hong Kong was supposed to be more of a milestone that it is ended up being."

For WTO Director General Pascal Lamy there is now a danger that important tariff and subsidy proposals already put forward could be scrapped if Hong Kong founders.

"What is already on the table can translate into a good result for development," he said late last month.

"It would certainly be disastrous if what we have disappears because we fail to move the negotiations forward."

Ministers coming to Hong Kong are anxious to avoid a repeat of the high-profile WTO conferences that collapsed in bitter discord in Seattle in 1999 and the Mexican resort of Cancun in 2003.

In the hot seat are the European Union, accused of failing to offer deep enough reductions in farm import duties, and the United States, accused of having been slow to propose reductions in agricultural export subsidies.