UNITED NATIONS - U.N. diplomats abandoned contentious efforts to draft a treaty that would outlaw human cloning and will likely settle for a weaker declaration that won't seek a comprehensive ban, officials said.

The last-minute agreement on Thursday appeared to be a major blow to President Bush, who had called for a total ban on cloning when he spoke before the U.N. General Assembly in August.

While there is near universal support among the United Nations' 191 members to ban reproductive cloning - the cloning of babies - countries have wrestled over whether to allow cloning for stem cell and other research.

For more than a year, the General Assembly's legal committee has been wrestling with rival cloning resolutions. One, offered by Costa Rica, calls for the drafting of a treaty banning all forms of cloning. The other, from Belgium, would allow some cloning for science.

In the end, the two sides were too divided to get enough support for a treaty that would achieve worldwide ratification, said Marc Pecsteen, a Belgian diplomat.

Instead, they agreed to settle on a less powerful, non-binding declaration that would include language ambiguous enough to please all sides.

"There is such a division in the international community that any treaty would not make it, so the idea of the declaration is to find some general language that we could all live with," Pecsteen said.

The sides were expected to convene in the legal committee today and agree to use a draft declaration, proposed by Italy, as the basis for discussions that would begin in February.

There will still likely be more passionate debate over the declaration.

Pecsteen stressed that Belgium and advocates of cloning for research had problems with it, but the sides saw new room for compromise.

"It's not that there's consensus on the Italian text," he said. "There's consensus on using it as the basis" for further talks.

In its original form, the Italian document called on nations to "prohibit any attempt at the creation of human life through cloning."

The Belgians object to using "human life" because they fear it could ban research.