Senior officials of the World Trade Organisation member countries gathered in New Delhi on Thursday for a two-day mini-ministerial meeting. Rituparna Bhuyan takes a look at the issues on the table.

•n What is the informal meeting of trade ministers in New Delhi about?

The initiative has been taken by India in an attempt to give the stalled Doha talks some momentum. More than 35 trade ministers have been invited to the summit but they represent interests of about 100 nations that are members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Negotiations on the WTO’s Doha Development Round, that aims to liberalise global trade by reducing import tariffs and barriers associated with exports and imports of goods and services, have been going on since late 2001.

•n What are the recent developments?

The last time trade ministers met under the WTO umbrella to discuss the Doha Round, was at Geneva in July 2008. The talks failed over significant differences on a number of issues, including developing and poor countries’ attempts to protect their marginal farmers’ interests, subsidies given by developed countries to multi-national corporations engaged in cotton farming as well as market access norms on industrial goods. The global media went to town painting India’s strong negotiating stance as the reason behind the failure. To re-start dialogue, the WTO released a series of papers in December 2008 to clarify the progress in talks till date. But the state of suspended animation continued, especially with the global financial crisis unravelling.

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