``Trade negotiations cannot continue to be an exercise in which we yield market access even as access obtained by us is thwarted or undermined,'' Commerce Minister Ramakrishna Hegde told G-15 trade ministers at a two-day meeting which got under way here today.

Both Hegde and Dr Ahmed Goweily, Trade Minister of Egypt, which is the chairman of the G-15, exhorted the group to evolve a coordinated approach to the ministerial conference at Seattle in November with the latter asking member-states not to allow divergence of views to obscure their vision.

``Where our concerns are at stake, we should unitedly strive to strike a positive influence over the Seattle outcome,'' Hegde said while underscoring the need for a common strategy on tacklingimplementation delays by the developed nations on existing WTO agreements.

The two-day meeting is a fallout of the decision by the G-15 nations at their Montego Bay (Jamaica) summit of February to undertake further consultations on core issues facing the developing nations as a whole.

The Asian nations led by India, Malaysia and Indonesia are attempting to impress upon Latin American countries like Brazil and Argentina the need to thwart attempts by the US, European Union and Japan to begin a fresh round of trade talks under the aegis of the Seattle conference.

Dr Ahmed Goweily noted that ``coordinating our positions is of utmost importance at various stages of negotiations, starting from setting the negotiation agenda until its final conclusion.''

He told the group that the ``preferential treatment given to developing countries since the Marakkesh Accord did not stand for a well-defined development dimension that would help integrate our economies in the world trading system and extract maximumbenefits from it''.