The Indian position has developed since the failure at Cancun last year to a point where India brought the trade ministers to Delhi to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Permanent interests remain.

Progress is not only in atmospherics, but substantive. Agriculture is the big issue, services and others merely follow. At Delhi India could not get Brazil and others to change this. The Doha ministerial declaration provided “that special and differential treatment for developing countries shall be an integral part of all elements of the negotiations”. India seems prepared to implement this in a trading regime.

I have argued before that India was willing to treat the earlier drafts as a base for discussion, since its interests lie in laying the foundation of more open trade as part of a widespread growth process. Issues of rural growth, employment and food security were important to it; the issue was not grain, but access. You need money to buy food, even if your farmers produce it and your shops have it. You need agricultural growth, not to grow grain, but to create a broad-based source of income. Paradoxically to grow on a widespread basis, grain growth will slow down. Diversification emerges when incomes grow fast in response to demand changes, but it was not happening fast enough.

Indian policy makers were willing to integrate monetary policy and tariff policy changes in a medium-term policy reform package which moves away from direct parastatal intervention to a crop-wise strategy — which was reform and WTO-compatible. There was then skepticism on whether the coalition which

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