Trade ministers of four key World Trade Organization members -- India, Brazil, the US and EU -- will make another attempt in Brussels later this week to bridge the gaps on the contentious issues of farm subsidies and market access.
Commerce Minister Kamal Nath, who will be engaged in several rounds of talks with his three counterparts, has expressed hope the recent paper on agriculture circulated by WTO would not hamper the Doha Round of trade talks.
Nath is likely to leave for Brussels tonight for the meeting that begins from May 17, a government official said. The G4 had last met in New Delhi in mid-April and set an informal deadline of December 31, 2007
for completion of the Doha Round of multilateral trade talks.
The Round, launched in the Qatari capital in 2001, was originally supposed to have been concluded by the end of 2004.
Deadlines have been repeatedly re-scheduled as differences have persisted over subsidies that rich nations give to their farmers and the trade barriers imposed by developing countries on goods imported from developed nations.
The Brussels meeting on May 17 and 18 would review the progress since the New Delhi meeting and identify the gaps which could be bridged, the official said.
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