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When is a deadline really a deadline? In the Doha Round of trade talks, maybe never.

This week, more than 50 trade ministers will meet in Geneva for what is billed as the last chance for a trade deal designed to boost global growth and alleviate poverty in poor countries. With big divisions remaining between the players, an outline agreement this week looks unlikely, even as leaders such as President Bush have recommitted to getting one.

"I don't see how they [can] get it done," says Susan Sechler, the former U.S. agriculture official who is now U.S. director of trade and development policy for the German Marshall Fund, a think tank that works to strengthen trans-Atlantic cooperation. She has been involved in trying to draw the sides closer to an agreement. "I can't imagine that they're not going to have to work the whole summer."

And maybe longer. Launched in the Qatari capital of Doha in 2001, the trade talks are a year and a half behind schedule and have missed numerous deadlines. The World Trade Organization ministers met in Hong Kong in December but were unable to make much progress. Trade diplomats have already started talking about another meeting next month. Now the clock is ticking toward what many consider a hard target of the end of the year, set by the realities of U.S. politics.

Mr. Bush's trade-promotion authority, secured in 2002, is due to expire in June 2007. The authority ensures any trade deal negotiated by the president gets an up-or-down vote in Congress, without amendments.

For months now, the White House has said the Doha negotiations -- not just the outlines of a deal but the myriad details that take months to negotiate -- need to be wrapped up by the end of the year, in order to give Mr. Bush time to push a pact through Congress. Any later, and it could get shredded by lobbying interests in Washington.

Even that deadline might not be so hard and fast. For a previous trade deal called the Uruguay Round, talks carried on for the better part of eight years. In mid-1993, in the final throes of negotiations, U.S. lawmakers approved a nine-month extension of then-President Bill Clinton's negotiating authority, just for the purpose of concluding that deal.

Administration officials say it would be risky to try a similar maneuver this time around. Back in the mid-1990s, there was a bipartisan consensus in Washington in support of free trade. Nowadays, that consensus is all but gone, casting doubt on Mr. Bush's ability to win even a short-term extension.

Continuing the talks into the third quarter carries additional problems. Several countries, including Brazil and the U.S., have elections that are likely to distract diplomats and make politicians less willing to compromise, leaving even less time to sew up a deal before Mr. Bush's fast-track authority expires.

Peter Allgeier, the U.S. ambassador to the WTO, described the next few weeks as "a critical juncture" for the Doha talks. Though disputes linger over manufacturing tariffs, he said the biggest differences are still in agriculture, where the U.S. and Europe are at odds over how deeply to cut tariffs and trade-distorting domestic supports. "There's a huge field in between," he said.

When WTO diplomats last week released a draft agriculture text, it had no fewer than 760 individual points that have to be agreed upon.

"This is not something that you could give to trade ministers," said Sallie James, trade policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington, explaining that there are too many technical issues for them to come to grips with in such a short amount of time.

Pascal Lamy, the head of the WTO, has said the U.S. and European Union might find common ground around proposals first offered by the so-called Group of 20 richer developing countries, including Brazil, China and India.

For Europe, that would mean increasing average farm-tariff cuts to somewhere around 54% from the 38% that it has proposed. For the U.S., it would mean cutting its most trade-distorting subsidies by 70%, not the 60% it has offered.

Neither the U.S. nor the EU will comment on its negotiating position. Rather, they appear locked in a standoff.

During recent weeks, officials on both sides of the Atlantic appear to have been torn between making sure the other side is blamed for any failure, and trying not to poison the atmosphere so badly that they can't try again if this week's meeting comes up short.

Mr. Lamy, for one, says it is this month or never. "One more month won't add the political traction," he said. "One more month...will change nothing."