India has stressed on special safeguards to protect the interests of its 650 million farmers at the World Trade Organisation mini-ministerial meeting, which began talks on several issues including the crucial market access in the agriculture sector and Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights.

Commerce and Industry Minister Arun Jaitley, speaking at a working dinner on Friday night that marked the start of the meeting in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt, made a strong pitch for a "special window" under the WTO agreement on agriculture to provide for special and differential treatments to ease the pressure on the farmers in meeting the competition posed by farm produce from the developed countries.

"The window should be by way of a special safeguard mechanism and other such measures, which would be of paramount importance in safeguarding the interest of 650 million Indian farmers who depend on agriculture for their livelihood," he said.

The mini-ministerial has been organised as a precursor to the fifth ministerial conference scheduled in September at Cancun in Mexico. It would facilitate exchange of views among member countries on the difficulties in implementation of several provisions of WTO.

Special and differential measures represent the fourth pillar of the ongoing negotiations on agriculture in the WTO.

The three other pillars are market access, domestic support and export competition.

Articulating the country's view on market access in agriculture sector, Jaitley underlined that flexibility in the domestic policies in agriculture was extremely important for developing countries like India.

The minister said though there had been some forward movement in the implementation and special and differential treatment issues, there was an urgent need for greater engagement on all sides to resolve the problem areas concerning these issues.

India also attached importance to expediting the multilaterally agreed upon solution on TRIPS and public health to address the problems faced by developing countries having insufficient manufacturing facilities to meet the requirement of pharmaceutical products in fighting diseases.

The points of discussions and the conclusions thereof should be noted in the draft agenda for the Cancun meet and the same should be circulated among the countries well in advance to enable members to consider and decide issues through consensus, he said.

About 30 countries are participating in the Egypt mini-ministerial including Australia, Brazil, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Canada, China, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, New Zealand, Thailand, EU, US, besides India.