NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Key trade ministers met on Thursday to work out how to turn political leaders' pledges to complete the Doha round trade talks by 2010 into reality.
The two-day meeting of about 35 ministers, hosted by an India determined to shake off its image as the spoiler in the talks, aims to draw up a road map to close the remaining gaps in the World Trade Organisation negotiations by the end of next year rather than tackling specific issues.
"Let's be frank in acknowledging that even the unequivocal expression of political resolve has not yet been translated into action," the host, Commerce and Industry Minister Anand Sharma told ministers in a welcome address.
WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy described the dilemma in a characteristically colourful image.
"Given the sort of 2010 deadline which leaders have given us given what's happening and not happening in the Geneva kitchen, we need a stronger linkage between what the dining room says and what the kitchen does," he said.
The talks, now in their eighth year, could produce a deal that boosts the global economy by $300-700 billion a year, according to one recent study, although other estimates of the benefits have been lower.
The negotiations were launched in the Qatari capital in late 2001 to create new trading opportunities and remove imbalances in global trade that put developing countries at a disadvantage.
Since then they have missed many self-imposed deadlines as exporters and importers, rich and poor fight over which tariffs and subsidies to cut and which sectors to open up.
Brazil's foreign minister, Celso Amorim, told the meeting it was clear the talks were now in the end game -- a view expressed earlier by Lamy and Australian Trade Minister Simon Crean.
Declaring the end game is important as it means negotiators in Geneva can get down to business to clinch the final bargains.
But it also suggests they cannot reopen what has been painfully agreed over the last few years and try and push the deal in a different direction.
"This implies a presumption that we have the outlines of a deal, which can be marginally adjusted, but not significantly changed," Amorim told the meeting.
Amorim, a keen supporter of a deal as Brazil becomes an agricultural superpower, warned the United States against trying to change the round from its mandated aim of helping developing countries into a quest for new business opportunities.
"If you want to change and transform the very essence of this round from a development round, a round that was centred on agriculture, to something that is how to extract more from emerging countries in manufactureds then it won't happen, that's all," he told Reuters.
Amorim, Sharma and other ministers from developing countries are determined to entrench the nature of Doha as a round to promote development.
Source : REUTERS