By IANS,
New Delhi : Commerce Minister Anand Sharma said he was looking forward to hosting the September meeting among global trade ministers to put the derailed global trade talks back on track.
India had proposed to host the mini-ministerial meeting of the 153-member World Trade Organisation (WTO) at the G20 Summit in London, which was attended by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, where leaders agreed to give a political push to trade talks.
“Technical discussions at WTO will resume this month. By the end of July we can expect to have the roadmap for the negotiations. Full fledged negotiations will most probably resume in September,” Sharma told an industry conference here.
“But a quick closure is unlikely, given the large number of issues remaining unresolved. A lot of momentum has been generated to re-start the Doha discussions but the road ahead is filled with challenges,” he told the conference organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI).
According to Sharma, the September mini-ministerial meeting of WTO in India will include representatives from the US, EU, as also various groups with offensive interests in farm sector and market access.
“We are expecting clear roadmap after this meeting. So far as India’s stand is concerned we are for a rule-based trading regime, which is fair and equitable,” said Sharma, who is seen as a key interlocutor in reviving the stalled trade talks.
“The agenda is to correct distortions in existing trade and to give opportunities to poor and developing nations,” he said, adding that was the reason why the present trade talks were being called the Doha Development Round.
He also said that the current attempts by some countries to resort to protectionism, in the wake of the sharp economic downturn in the global economy, will only deepen the crisis further and delay the recovery process.
The current round of trade talks had kicked off in the Qatari capital Doha in 2001 but have successively met with a stalemate, mainly on account of sharp differences between the rish and developing countries on issues like farm subsidies and market access.