Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown on Wednesday came down rich countries' subsidy to their agriculture sector. He pointed out the need to the subsidies and asked the developing countries to do more on their part to bring the Doha round to a successful close.

"We (the US and Europe) are subsidising our agriculture to give uncompetitive prices and harming the development of countries in this continent and elsewhere. We cannot defend this agricultural protectionism and one of the main aims of the Doha round is to reduce substantially the agricultural tariffs that are imposed by the EU and the agricultural subsidies that are paid by the US," he told the CII partnership summit in Banglore on Wednesday.

He fully agreed that it was anomalous to contemplate debt relief of around $170 billion for poor countries while "annual agricultural subsidies from the richest continents is $300 billion."

On rescuing the Doha round he felt that "we have made some progress. There is an agreement that we must make changes. Figures have been on the table for some time and have got higher over the course of negotiations for the reduction of tariffs and subsidies. I believe that Europe and America should be prepared to go further and emerging markets like India and Brazil must go beyond what is on the table on industrial goods and services."

If there is no multilateral agreement there will be a stalling of the world trade process, countries will resort to a greater degree of protectionism than even now and the process already underway, that is more protectionism in America and Europe, will gain ground.

On the issue of sharing the burden of cutting carbon emissions between the rich and the poor countries, he agreed that "there should be no intention and plan that will unfairly discriminate against those countries like India that are now raising your growth levels."