Finance ministers from developing countries called on Friday for renewed political commitment by rich and poor nations to salvage critical global trade liberalisation talks that are currently foundering.
Ministers in the Group of 24 also renewed their insistence that developing countries be given a stronger voice in the leadership of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and said measures were needed to ensure that wealthy nations honour their aid commitments.
The ministers held their twice-yearly meeting here ahead of weekend sessions of the policymaking bodies of the World Bank and the IMF.
The Group of 24 in a statement voiced concern that World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations launched in late 2001 in the Qatari capital Doha to remove barriers to world trade were now "at risk."
The Doha round was crafted specifically to harness trade as a means of improving living standards in the world's most impoverished nations.
"Many critical issues have yet to be agreed upon, which underscores the need to increase the political commitment on the part of both developed and developing countries to a successful and ambitious outcome," the ministers said.
In Geneva Friday, gloomy WTO negotiators acknowledged that a key deadline had moved out of reach, with top officials exchanging blame for the impasse.
European Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson said that the WTO's 150 member governments had failed to narrow their differences enough to reach an agreement on a crucial plank in the process - the mechanics of cutting tariffs and other trade barriers - by a target date of April 30.
As they have done for the past two years, developing country ministers called for rapid progress toward increasing the representation of their governments in the World Bank and the IMF.
They said "concrete progress" was "imperative" ahead of the next meeting of the Bank and the Fund in Singapore in September.
The group acknowledged efforts by IMF Managing Director Rodrigo Rato to boost the clout of poor countries in the IMF but voiced reservations about the absence of timetables in the proposal.
The ministers also warned that many developing countries were "off-track" in efforts to meet the Millennium Development goals, adopted by world leaders in 2000 and which call for the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day to be halved by 2015.
While they welcomed an increase in aid and debt relief commitments by rich countries, they stressed that "mechanisms are needed to ensure that these commitments are adhered to."
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