(Updates throughout)
By Doug Palmer
WASHINGTON, Nov 14 (Reuters) - World leaders faced pressure on Friday to breathe new life into struggling world trade talks and resist imposing any new trade barriers as they convened a two-day summit on the global financial crisis.
A study by the International Food Policy Research Institute said more than $1 trillion in world trade could be at risk if the Doha round is not concluded soon and countries respond to economic turmoil by hiking tariffs.
That estimate reflects $336 billion in increased trade that could come from tariff and subsidy cuts under the Doha round, and $728 billion in lost sales that could arise if countries raise import duties to maximum levels allowed under earlier world trade deals, the study said.
An international coalition of business groups urged leaders of the Group of 20 developed and developing countries to agree "to a freeze on the imposition of any new trade and investment barriers for goods and services and intensify efforts to conclude successfully the WTO Doha round."
The coalition included business groups from the United States, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Australia, Canada, Italy, Mexico, Britain, Japan and France, whose leaders are in Washington for the summit.
Trade ministers meeting in Geneva in July came very near to reaching a breakthrough in the Doha round.
But that effort collapsed when the United States clashed with fellow G20 members, India and China, over the terms of a "special safeguard mechanism" to protect farmers in poor countries from a surge in imports. That issue is still not resolved.
New Delhi and Beijing also have resisted U.S. demands for "sectoral" negotiations in which a critical mass of countries would agree to reduce tariffs in certain industries to zero.
"If the G20 nations agree on immediate adoption of key sectoral agreements -- such as electrical equipment, medical products, chemicals, and others in those negotiations -- it would send a strong signal to the global economy that there is confidence and hope for the future," the National Association of Manufacturers said in a statement on Thursday.
SET STAGE FOR BREAKTHROUGH
U.S. officials have said leading up to the G20 summit they hoped leaders would set the stage for a breakthrough in the seven-year-old Doha round by the end of the year.
But Deputy U.S. Trade Representative John Veroneau was cautious about whether the leaders would formally endorse the goal of reaching an agreement on "modalities" -- essentially the guts of a deal covering agriculture, manufactured goods and services trade -- in the last eight weeks of 2008.
"Obviously, it's a subject that has been on the table up to the G20 summit, but I won't get ahead of the leaders," Veroneau said in remarks at George Washington University's law school.
Meanwhile, other key players stressed the importance of finishing the Doha round -- which countries agreed to launch exactly seven years ago on Friday -- as a bulwark against protectionism and catalyst for growth.
"We think it is incumbent on all of us that we should resist protectionism and advance the liberalization of trade and investment, so in this respect, wrapping up the Doha Round is crucially important," Japanese spokesman Kazuo Kodama said.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he believed most countries had learned from the Great Depression that open markets were the best way to promote growth.
"The worst possible thing you could do at this particular time would be to follow the problems we're having in the economy with a series of measures that closed our economies or began to throw up protectionist trade barriers. I think that would be a devastating mistake. It would really repeat the errors of the 1930s," Harper said in Winnipeg before leaving for Washington to attend the summit.
(additional reporting by Randall Palmer and Paul Eckert) (Editing by Vicki Allen)