From banana imports to rules for protecting the product names, officials and diplomats were working yesterday on a range of issues ahead of next week's ministerial trade negotiations.

But trade experts said the significance of the Doha round talks goes far beyond the detail of tariff and subsidy cuts, signalling the international community's ability to deal with major problems such as the food crisis.

"If governments can't even agree on a trade negotiation I'd like to know what they're going to do in climate change over the next half a decade," World Trade Organisation Chief Economist Patrick Low told a briefing.

WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy called the Geneva meeting, which starts formally on Monday and is set to last a week, to push for a breakthrough in the long-running Doha round.

The talks have missed repeated deadlines since they were launched in late 2001 to open up world trade and help developing countries export their way out of poverty. But negotiators say there is a new sense of urgency, and even optimism, now. Ministers from about 30 countries aim to clinch the outlines of a deal in the core areas of agriculture and industrial goods next week, to prevent the talks being sidelined by US elections and next year's change in the White House.

Indian Commerce Minister Kamal Nath said any deal had to address the challenges of three "Fs" – finance, food and fuel. "These three are the backdrop against which these negotiations are being held," said Nath.

World leaders from US President George W Bush to Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva have called for a deal. A pact will see rich countries like the United States, Japan and EU members open up their markets for food by cutting farm tariffs and subsidies.

In return tariff cuts in big emerging countries such as India and Brazil will give them more access to international markets for industrial goods and services.

France, the European Union's biggest food producer and current holder of its presidency, said the EU had exhausted its scope for concessions in agriculture.

"We have a shared objective, to achieve a rebalancing of the concessions the EU has already made," French Trade Secretary Anne-Marie Idrac told a news conference in Brussels.

EU trade chief Peter Mandelson said he felt EU governments had strengthened his hand in pressing for more concessions from others in the WTO talks.

In the WTO's consensus-driven system each of the 152 members – rising to 153 next week when Cape Verde joins – has a veto.