Describing agriculture as the make-or-break issue for the successful conclusion of Doha round of the World Trade Organisation negotiations, developing countries, including India, have stressed on the importance of convergence of views on special products, special safeguard measures mechanism for developing countries and the issue of subsidy in the area of agriculture.

"Agriculture is the make or break issue for the successful conclusion of the Doha round of trade negotiations. However, the time is running out without a major breakthrough on the modalities of future trade liberalisation that the WTO members have to agree on at the fifth WTO Ministerial at Cancun," the meeting under the aegis of Government of India, UNCTAD-DFID project noted.

They agreed that special products and special safeguard mechanisms could provide developing countries with the much-needed flexibility to address their development concerns, an official statement said in New Delhi on Monday.

The countries, which deliberated on how best to ensure that the negotiations in WTO result in the modalities for future agricultural lberalisation, said that the issue of export competitiveness was equally important as also the issue of the elimination of subsidies as high level of subsidies affected the viability of their domestic markets.

Noting that while concepts of SP and SSM in Harbinson's draft were good, their problem was that the draft leaving the actual design of SP and SSM modalities open to later technical consultations.

The meeting underlined the need for developing countries to lead together these consultations so as to arrive at the draft modalities that would suit their interests.

Agricultural subsidies provided by the developed countries undermined the potential gains from agricultural trade to developing countries and their economic and social goals including food security, rural development and poverty alleviation, the participants from countries including Brazil, Columbia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Indonesia,
Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Peru, Korea, Turkey, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Venezuela noted.

The participants also discussed issues relating to the possible product-selecting modality for SP and defining technical modalities of SSM such as product eligibility, trigger conditions and actual action.

Majority of the participants were of the view that a self-selection would be the only realistic and operationally effective approach but it should be on the basis of objective criteria, which would take into account concerns of rural livelihood, food security and poverty alleviation.

On SSM, they felt modalities needed to be simpler to operate than special safeguard measures, which were available only to the developed countries under the current WTO agreement on agriculture.