Trade ministers from the G90 developing nations were due to open a strategy session on global trade negotiations in Mauritius on Monday, less than a year after a World Trade Organization summit saw their bloc pitted against the world's wealthiest countries.
The event's formal opening ceremony was scheduled for mid-afternoon, while the ministers were due to get down to work on Tuesday.
The G90, formed at the WTO summit, comprises the 79-state Africa, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) bloc, the African Union and nations known collectively in global trade bargaining as the world's least developed countries.
"I hope that we make all progress neccessary for us to conclude the Doha round (of WTO negotiations) whose main agenda will be development in the poorest countries," Mauritian Prime Minister Paul Berenger told reporters.
"If the ministerial (WTO) conference in Cancun, Mexico, last year was a failure, it was because developed countries didn't give enough attention to development," he added.
"The development of the poorest countries must be at the heart of the Doha round," he said.
Also in attendance will be the developing world's two most important bargaining partners -- Pascal Lamy representing the European Union, and Robert Zoellick of the United States -- as well as WTO Director General Supachai Panitchpakdi.
India's Kamal Nath, Pakistan's Humayu Akhtar Khan and Delso Amorim of Brazil are also expected.
The G90 is committed to a difficult task: forging a unified front to press the EU and US governments to scrap their billion-dollar agricultural subidies.
The dispute over the subsidies, which distort prices and skew competition, was among the prime causes for the collapse of the WTO summit last September in Cancun, Mexico.
West African countries have estimated that they lose one billion dollars a year on cotton exports because of Western subsidies.
Mauritian trade representative Assab Buglah told AFP the G90 wanted to "send a strong sign to other WTO members that it will contribute positively to restarting negotiations and it will show it can be flexible".
But Foreign Minister Jayen Cuttaree, one of the founders of the G90, stressed here Sunday: "The Doha (trade round) process must be fully multilateral."
"We must make sure that these negotiations will lead to fair and equitable results," Cuttaree told a meeting of ACP trade ministers ahead of the G90 talks.
"The big developed countries can negotiate bilateral deals and seal free trade agreements and choose their partners," he said. "We don't have this possibility. Only a well-regulated trade system can protect the rights of small economies."
Some analysts fear that the G90, which includes 63 WTO members, is too big a group to serve as a negotiating bloc and that their huddle comes too close to a end-of-July deadline.
In order to meet the WTO's objective for the Doha round, begun in 2001, of closing a trade deal by the end of 2004, its 147 member states must agree on a draft framework by the end of the month.
Global trade actors are scrambling this month to cobble together support for a deal.
Ahead of the G90 event, Zoellick and Lamy met at the weekend with WTO trade representatives from Australia, Brazil and India in Paris in a bid to build common consensus on agricultural issues.
The European Commission is also set to issue proposals on July 14 to reform its sugar trade, where massive subsidies have severely distorted the world market.
But some G90 countries, such as sugar giant Madagascar, have solved the problem through a special trade deal with the European Union -- which could now come under the axe in the Doha round.Agence France Presse:
