Hundreds of hours and millions of pounds all add up to one global disaster at Bali

Poverty The US blocks clean water and electricity for the most deprived people on the planet, as talks collapse in Indonesia

John Prescott was urged yesterday to go round the world "in 80 days" to save a summit on world poverty after vital talks collapsed.

The talks – the last formal preparatory negotiations before the summit which meets in Johannesburg at the end of August – broke up in Bali, Indonesia, with more than 100 points still unresolved, largely due to American obduracy.

The Bush administration rejected any new targets for reducing poverty and, in effect, refused to negotiate, stating its position and challenging the rest of the world to take it or leave it. It blocked plans to halve the number of the world's people without any sanitation – a situation that causes a child to die every 10 seconds from water-borne disease – and to double those who have electricity and other modern forms of energy.

The negotiations at Bali were made more difficult because of weak leadership of the developing countries at the talks that allowed Opec, which opposed any resolutions on energy, to set the tone. Europe was also ineffectually led by Spain, the current holder of the EU presidency.

The collapse throws the summit – officially named the World Summit On Sustainable Development – into jeopardy, amid fears that heads of government will now stay away from it to avoid being associated with a failure. But Tony Blair, the first prime minister to announce his attendance, is committed to going, and Britain has led the international drive to get the summit to produce results.

The Johannesburg meeting was intended as the most significant world summit on the environment and the problems of the developing world since the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro 10 years ago. The Johannesburg summit will review progress since Rio while turning the spotlight on problems in the developing world and in particular the eradication of poverty. But the American intransigence throws its future into doubt.

Derek Osborn, the head of Britain's main co-ordinating group for the summit – the Stakeholder Forum For Our Common Future – called on Mr Prescott to travel the world to save it from disaster.

The Deputy Prime Minister, who successfully brokered the Kyoto protocol on global warming, has visited 30 prime ministers and almost 100 environment ministers over the past two years, as Mr Blair's representative, to try to prepare the way for a successful summit. But he has been scarred recently by inaccurate press reports accusing him of wanting to go to Bali for a "junket''.

Mr Osborn said: "There is an awful lot to be done in a very short time. There are just 80 days until the summit opens and someone is going to have to go round the world a couple of times in those 80 days to pull it off. We really need John Prescott.''

There are two remaining opportunities at the end of this month to rescue the conference from disaster. A meeting of a few heads of government in Rio arranged by the Brazilian President, Fernando Henrique Cardoso – and the G8 summit which will see leaders of rich countries meeting their counterparts from several African states. Experts say, however, that there will have to be a sustained effort to mobilise key leaders around the world if the summit is to succeed. Failure could put back by decades the hopes of reducing world poverty.

Margaret Beckett, the Secretary of State for the Environment, tried to put a positive gloss on the Bali summit, saying "a huge amount" had been achieved. "We have had a lot of movement and achieved quite a lot of work," she said.

"There was a bit of disappointment because we didn't achieve quite as much as we could have done, given the goodwill that exists, but we ran out of time. These are complex negotiations that involve so many countries across the world, so it is difficult."

Mrs Beckett had been criticised for the £180,000 cost to the taxpayer of sending a British delegation to Bali.

Friends of the Earth International criticised the outcome of the Indonesian talks as a "foul result" that had produced too many voluntary agreements that benefited the US and the World Trade Organisation.