The 18-nation grouping said the World Trade Organisation's so-called Doha Round of negotiations, which was suspended last July, should resume no later than November.
"The Round cannot be allowed to drift," the Cairns Group said in a statement issued after a three-day meeting in this northern Australian resort town.
"Further delay adds to the risk that we lose the gains secured to date in the negotiations and the continued momentum for trade reform. The costs of delay will be borne by our farmers and our rural communities."
The free trade lobby group's meeting was attended by officials from the EU, US, Japan and the WTO in a bid to reignite the campaign for a multilateral trade deal.
The Cairns Group ministers included a blunt message for their EU and US guests, as well as other countries viewed as protectionist traders, in their statement.
"The EU, US, G10 and others with the highest levels of support and protection must make the necessary improvements to their offers on market access and domestic support, to establish the basis for the early resumption of negotiations," they said.
The ministers ambitiously urged the WTO's 149 member countries to get back to the bargaining table by November.
"The costs of continued delay will be borne by our farmers and our rural communities," the statement said.
It also said the negotiating reality was that modest reform proposals would not be enough to secure a deal.
The WTO suspended the Doha negotiations in July amid a bitter EU-US rift on farm subsidies and tariffs.
The talks were launched in the Qatari capital in 2001 and were supposed to deliver a global agreement on reducing agricultural and industrial trade barriers by 2004, but dragged on without success until July's meltdown.
Oxfam slams meeting
The aid and development organisation and fair trade advocate Oxfam criticised the Cairns Group in “failing to revive the Doha 'Development' Round of trade talks”.
In a media statement Oxfam claimed that during the two-day meeting, the EU and US spent two billion dollars on farm subsidies to protect domestic markets.
“This was at the expense of almost 1.2 billion farmers and rural people from developing countries forced to live on $1 or less a day,” the statement said.
“There's no cheer for the world's poor as the 20th Cairns Group meeting wraps up,' said Oxfam's Advocacy Coordinator, Jeff Atkinson.
“And frankly there's no point bothering to resuscitate the talks until the US and EU get serious about giving poor people a chance to trade their way out of poverty,” he said.
US flags deeper cuts
The Cairns Group meeting was seen as one of the final hopes for resurrecting the Doha round, with the window of opportunity closing fast as the US Bush administration prepares to focus on mid-term congressional elections in November.
The US yesterday flagged deeper cuts to its farm subsidies to help move negotiations, but said Europe had to come to the table with significant reductions in tariff protection.
The Cairns Group said small changes to both forms of support would not be adequate.