GENEVA - The United States must reduce its trade-distorting farm subsidies to a level between $13 billion and $16.4 billion as part of a new global commerce pact, according to initial estimates of a WTO proposal released Tuesday.

Major developing countries such as Brazil, China and India will also have to offer greater market opportunities for industrial exports, according to the draft agreements unveiled by the World Trade Organization's chief agriculture and manufacturing mediators. The European Union appears to have largely satisfied the trade body's demands for liberalizing its farm markets.

"Despite all the setbacks, failures and deadlocks that we have experienced over the past year, the underlying fact remains that under the surface very considerable progress has been made on all areas of this negotiation," said Crawford Falconer, the New Zealand ambassador who leads the WTO's agriculture negotiations. "There comes a moment - and this is just such a moment - when the time for cutting to the chase is in fact upon us, and no other option is available."

Falconer's proposed reduction in U.S. payments to American farmers is greater than the $17 billion annual cap Washington offered last month when talks among WTO's four biggest powers collapsed.

The United States spent only $11 billion on trade-distorting subsidies last year, but the Bush administration wants the flexibility afforded by a higher cap in the event that greater assistance to farmers is necessary in the future.

U.S. trade officials are still analyzing the WTO proposals, said Gretchen Hamel, a spokeswoman for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. She said the U.S. will "exchange … initial reactions" with trading partners next week in Geneva.

Congress, meanwhile, is drafting a new farm bill that will replace legislation approved in 2002 that significantly increased the subsidies available to U.S. farmers. So far, there appears to be little appetite on the Hill for significant subsidy cuts.

The House Agriculture Committee is scheduled to begin debating a proposed bill today that a committee aide said doesn't make any major changes to current payments to farmers.

Brazil and India criticized the United States for its failure to offer deep enough cuts in the subsidies, which critics claim unfairly deflate international prices, making it impossible for poorer nations to develop their economies by selling farm produce abroad. Washington and Brussels blamed the impasse on the two developing countries' failure to make serious offers to open up their industrial markets.

The 150-member trade body will start new negotiations based on the two documents next week. Many doubt that multilateral talks in Geneva will turn out more successfully than those that involved only the U.S., EU, Brazil and India, only the latest setback in the WTO's long-struggling Doha round of trade talks.

"The prospect of failure is … now so familiar to us that it can almost present itself seductively to us as our friend," Falconer said in his 44-page draft.

The Doha round aims to add billions of dollars to the world economy and help poorer countries develop their economies through new trade flows. But negotiations have struggled since their inception six years ago in Qatar's capital, largely because of wrangling between rich and poor countries over eliminating barriers to farm trade and, more recently, manufacturing trade.

Under the WTO's complicated formula used for determining industrial tariffs, a lower figure corresponds to higher cuts. The draft by Don Stephenson, chair of the WTO's manufacturing talks, calls for a figure of 8-9 for rich nations and 19-23 by developing countries.