A Salvage Operation : The Europeans and the Americans went head to head in Montreal over farm subsidies and trade barriers. The result: an agreement to try again later.

MONTREAL — The U.S. decision to allow the 2-year-old global trade talks to hang in the balance over the issue of trade in agriculture represents a calculated--but high-risk--gamble for the United States.

In effect, Washington is betting that America can get a better deal on persuading the Europeans to reduce their farm subsidies and agricultural trade barriers if it refuses to compromise now and makes another try in April--presumably after pressures on the European Community have intensified.

The Montreal meeting, attended by trade ministers from 96 countries, broke up in disarray late Thursday night after the United States and the Europeans failed to resolve their impasse over the agricultural trade issue. The conference was intended as a stock-taking session, designed to hammer out guidelines for negotiators in the final two years of the four-year Uruguay Round of trade talks, which are scheduled to end in 1990.

Accords Put on Hold

To try to salvage the talks, the ministers agreed to refer the entire agenda to the Geneva-based General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, with orders to try to muster a consensus on agriculture and three other unresolved issues in time for a special meeting of trade negotiators in Geneva during the first week in April. In the meantime, 11 other accords hammered out by the ministers this week--such as a negotiating plan for writing new rules on trade in services--will be “put on hold” until a full-scale package is approved in April.

But the strategy--engineered by U.S. Trade Representative Clayton K. Yeutter and approved at the ceremonial closing of the trade ministers’ meeting Friday, could also end up scuttling the entire Uruguay Round of global trade-liberalization talks--or at least seriously delay its completion well beyond 1990.

“We know it’s a high-risk strategy, but it’s something we’re going to have to take,” a U.S. negotiator said Friday.

C. Michael Aho, trade specialist for the Council on Foreign Affairs in New York, agreed. “I’m not sure they had another alternative,” he said.

The Americans’ hope is that the specter of failure at the Montreal conference--combined with a desire by many countries to push through the accords worked out on other issues, such as services and tropical products--will intensify pressure on the Europeans to move further toward the U.S. position.

Washington wants the negotiators to commit themselves to drafting a plan for eliminating agricultural subsidies and trade barriers entirely by some specific date. But the European Community is refusing to go further than merely promising a “substantial reduction” of existing impediments. And the Reagan Administration is simply not persuaded that the Europeans’ promise will yield much in results.

U.S. negotiators had expected an impasse on the agricultural issue at this week’s talks, but they were surprised by the last-minute refusal of some developing countries--notably Argentina and Chile--to support other proposals on the agenda, such as the one involving services, if an agriculture accord were not reached.

As a result, Yeutter tried an end-run by putting all decisions off until next April and linking them all to approval of a compromise on agriculture. If the negotiators cannot reach an agreement on agriculture, none of the other provisions will go into effect.

But carrying out that strategy will not be easy. For one thing, the frenzy of negotiations comes just as the incoming Bush Administration’s new trade representative, Carla A. Hills, will be getting settled in her new office. Hills does not have wide experience in the trade field.

The April deadline will also force the Bush Administration into shaping its trade policy much earlier than it had expected--at a time when there are competing demands for hammering out budget and defense policies as well.

And the bargaining will come at a time when United States and the European Community may be embroiled in other trade disputes. The two sides are already headed for a series of retaliations and counter-retaliations in early January over European meat-hygiene standards that Washington contends will unfairly bar American meat exports. Other trade disputes are on the horizon.

But the second-chance talks also may offer the new Administration some more flexibility as well. By taking the equivalent (in the trade field) of President-elect George Bush’s “read my lips--no new taxes” stand on the tax issue, Yeutter may be easing the way for Bush to take a “kinder, gentler” posture in the trade negotiations and to compromise more readily when the April deadline rolls around.

The European Community, too, will be changing trade ministers. Frans Andriessen, currently Europe’s hard-line agriculture minister, most likely will move to become trade minister. “There is a slight possibility that there could be negotiations possible at Geneva in April that were not possible in Montreal,” he said in an interview Friday.

Indeed, U.S. policy here appeared to be to act tough as was necessary to advance the U.S. agenda for the longer-haul. U.S. negotiators spent hours telling anyone who would listen that they were interested more in shaping the final results of the talks in 1990 than they were in engineering a Pyrrhic victory at Montreal.

Despite some criticism here of harsh U.S. tactics, “I wouldn’t do any of it differently,” Yeutter told reporters later.

To be sure, it was not just the U.S.-European battle over agriculture that kept the Montreal meeting from proving a short-term success.

Little Required From U.S.

An accord that the United States had sought laying out stringent parameters for talks on strengthening protection for patents and copyrights was blocked by the delegation from India, which feared that enforcement of intellectual property rights would result in higher pharmaceutical prices than Indians now pay for counterfeit medicines.

And the United States gave away far less than it was prepared to in “concessions” for developing countries on their exports of tropical products, such as coffee and jute. Instead of pressing for its own proposal, Washington gave in to a European plan that looked impressive on the surface but actually required almost nothing from the United States, whose tariffs on such goods already are low. Developing countries mainly wanted a quick accord as a symbolic gesture, a Western negotiator said.

To be sure, strategists may be arguing for months whether the United States did not overplay its hand in refusing to compromise on the agriculture issue here in Montreal, but some analysts said the United States would have lost all its leverage if it had. The other proposals on the Montreal agenda would have been approved, and there would have been nothing that Washington could have used either to prod or tempt other countries into action.

“It would have sapped a lot of the intensity from the talks,” said Henry R. Nau, a former National Security Council trade specialist now at George Washington University.