Negotiators at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) began talks on Monday aimed at eventually forging a global pact to end delays in customs procedures that cost many economies millions of euros (dollars) annually. But under an agreement in July to launch the discussions, delegations from the WTO's 148 member nations will initially focus on how developing countries can be helped to set up more efficient structures to process imported and exported goods.
Trade sources said envoys from African and Asian countries, many of whom had long been suspicious of European Union motives in pushing for talks on what is known in WTO jargon as "trade facilitation", welcomed the start of the discussions.
Two poorer WTO nations - Rwanda and Nepal - said that as landlocked states they were especially interested in seeing an end to border delays which raised the already high cost of getting goods to and from outside markets.
Other WTO members - from African giant Nigeria through Indonesia, Pakistan and Philippines to Egypt and Uruguay - also pledged support, while insisting that an agreement must make allowance for helping developing countries meet its terms.
Trade facilitation, which implicitly also covers corruption at points where goods enter countries, was one of four new topics that the 25-nation EU asked the WTO to take into its negotiating agenda at a conference in Singapore in 1995.
But until July, developing countries had flatly refused to consider what became known as the "Singapore issues" - investment policies, competition policies, and government procurement, as well as trade facilitation.
They feared that enforceable WTO rules on how long customs could take to process shipments, on insurance standards, warehousing and related issues, would burden them with extra costs and allow rich powers to bully them.
EU pressure to accept talks, backed strongly by Japan, was partly the cause of the collapse of a ministerial conference in Cancun, Mexico, in September 2003 which was supposed to push ahead the WTO's current Doha Round of free trade talks.
But work by UN bodies in Geneva such as the UNCTAD trade and development agency, the International Trade Centre (ITC) and the Economic Commission for Europe helped convince poorer countries they could gain from easing cross-border flows.
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