GENEVA (Reuters) - World trade will grow by nearly 10 percent this year, rebounding strongly from the economic crisis and shrugging off halting progress in the eight-year-old Doha round, World Trade Organization figures showed on Friday.

The WTO said the volume of merchandise trade would expand by 9.5 percent after dropping 12.2 percent in 2009, the biggest contraction in more than 70 years.

The forecast growth this year comprises 7.5 percent for developed countries and 11 percent for developing countries, it said in a statement.

The outlook came as WTO's 153 members decided to push on with negotiations in the Doha round, launched in late 2001 to free up global commerce and help poor countries prosper through more trade, but tacitly dropped a 2010 deadline for a deal and set no new timetable.

"Although we have made some progress since 2008, there is no denying the fact that we are not where we wanted to be by now," WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy told a meeting of the WTO's Trade Negotiations Committee.

Lamy told a news conference that no members had called for a suspension of the Doha round.

And he said the revival in world trade this year in the face of continuing protectionist pressures showed the value 2010-03-26


of the global trading system, which the Doha talks were intended to bring up to date.

The committee meeting caps a week of intensive talks joined by senior officials from national capitals, which many members had hoped would be an opportunity to clinch an outline Doha deal when it was called at a WTO ministerial conference in December.

Several senior trade diplomats said there was a danger that continuing the negotiations without a deadline could amount to a suspension of the talks by stealth.

Others said that dropping fixed dates and calls for ministerial meetings injected some realism into the talks, which were likely to take two or more years to complete.

Lamy declined to comment on the 2010 deadline, saying it was a matter for the G20 leaders who had set it.

Where the gaps in positions are clear -- as with farm subsidies -- Lamy said the talks must focus on preparing options for ministers to take the political decisions to close them.

But where there is no agreement on the size of the gaps -- for instance in opening up trade in manufactured goods -- negotiators need to do more technical work to get the issues to a stage where they can propose political options, he said.

In value terms, trade contracted by 23 percent to $12.5 trillion in 2009 from $16.1 trillion in 2008, the WTO said.

Trade in services, for which there was no 2010 forecast, contracted by 13 percent in 2009 to $3.3 trillion, it said.