India sent clear signals to industrialised nations that their trade-distorting farm subsidies should be phased out and barriers to agricultural exports removed in a bid to protect livelihood security of millions of farmers in developing countries.
Articulating developing countries' stand on this contentious WTO issue, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told leaders from over 100 Asian and African countries at the Asian-African Summit, "We must strive to evolve a formulae to phase out trade-distorting subsidies in the developed countries."
He also referred to the multilateral trade negotiations on industrial goods (non-agricultural market access) and said, "We need a lowering of tariff and non-tariff barriers to our other exports."
Voicing concerns over rigid visa restrictions, which continued to obstruct free movement of people and services, he said it deprived the people of Asia and Africa of full benefit from their main economic strength.
"We need greater protection for our bio-diversity resources and fair recompense for their exploitation by others," he said.
The Prime Minister emphasised that new structures must be created of mutual support, solidarity and cooperation to benefit from the best practices and appropriate technologies among the people of Asia and Africa.
"This is required as urgently today as it was fifty years ago," he noted. Singh outlined specific areas where such cooperation was vital including agriculture, technology, combating terrorism and bringing out democratisation of the United Nations.
''We must ensure that access to both new and appropriate technologies, and to cutting edge areas of science are expanded greatly. Advances in biotechnology can promote revolutionary changes in agriculture and health,'' he said.
He noted that while Asia and Africa included both major producers and consumers of energy, the framework within which the two continents produced and consumed energy was determined elsewhere.
"We must address this anomaly," he stressed adding that new and renewable sources of energy could provide a more secure energy environment.
Singh urged that imaginative strategies of human resource development based on information and communication technology could accelerate the pace of social and economic development.
"Afro-Asian nations can benefit from cooperative management of research and development in all these areas."
The Prime Minister declared that to achieve these goals, "our strategic partnership must be inspired by a common vision of globalisation based on maximising cooperative self reliance."
The people of Asia and Africa must ensure that in the transition from dependence to interdependence, there must be greater cohesion between the nations of the two continents. He regretted that South to South linkages had weakened when they were most required.
"India sees South-South cooperation as an effective cooperative approach to the challenges of development. We are committed to this objective," he said.
