"I don't think the meeting was a failure. It has narrowed down disagreements in several areas and it is a step forward," Kamal Nath, Commerce and Industry Minister, who convened the informal meeting at India House, said.
The one-day meeting attended by EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, US Trade Representative Rob Portman, and Brazilian Minister for External Relations Celso Amorim lasted till almost midnight. The Trade and Industry Minister of Japan, T Nikai, attended it as a special invitee.
The meeting will continue in Geneva on Tuesday and Wednesday and it will be attended by Commerce ministers from other G-20 countries. Nath said the meeting had resulted in greater understanding of each others' positions.
"We discussed Non-Agricultural Market Access in great length. We have also had very constructive discussions on special products and special safeguard mechanism," he said.
"It is the resolve of everyone in the meeting to ensure that we don't lower the ambition of the Doha Round. We will be working towards that in our discussions in the next couple of days," he said.
Nath, however, admitted that owing to time constraints it might not be possible to achieve full modalities on the Doha Round at the scheduled meeting in Hong Kong in December.
"We all have agreed that we should work for full modalities. But time may be short. Expectation in Hong Kong will be less than what it was earlier - may be half or two/third." He said the very fact that "we have moved very fast on Doha Round is creditable."
Stressing that agriculture subsidy is very important, Nath said, "We have been talking about agriculture for the last three months. We have got to talk about other things also. We have discussed special products, special safeguards mechanism in agriculture which was not there earlier. We also discussed services which was not discussed before.
He disagreed with the assumption of a journalist that the meeting in London and the proposed meeting in Hong Kong are failures. "We are tempering the expectation based on attainability," he said.
Echoing Nath's sentiments, Mandelson said, "We had good discussions tonight on a range of issues including key market access areas. We have exchanged views on our proposed levels of ambitions for Hong Kong, across a number of areas.
Of course differences remain and certainly this discussion tonight must be enlarged to a broader section of WTO members. That is the purpose of meeting on Wednesday.
"We go into that meeting on a stronger platform than we had at the beginning of the meeting today. That is progress of this meeting," he said.
Brazilian Foreign Relations Minister Celso Amorim said while they had useful discussion on Non-Agricultural Market Access, "there was not enough discussion on agriculture subsidy and on how we can make progress in that area."
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