Ministers from developing countries are to meet here on Tuesday and Wednesday for talks aimed at restarting trade liberalisation negotiations, an official statement saicT

The meeting would also be attended by World Trade Organisation director general Supachai Panitchpakdi, ELI trade commissioner Pascal Lamy and UN deputy secretrary general and high representative for developing countries, Anwarul Karim.

Relief agencies Oxfam, Enda Tiers-Monde and Action Aid, which are also attending the gathering, said in a joint statement that the meeting would be "the last chance to consolidate negotiating positions on global trade before key decisions aretaken in Geneva in July".

The participants would "try to find a common ground in order to relaunch stalled WTO negotiations.

The 147 members of the World Trade Organisation face a July deadline to agree on a framework for particularly contentious topics

with a view to produce tangible results to wrap-up the so-called Doha round of trade talks by January 1,2005.

The trade negotiations have been on the back burner since the failure of a WTO ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mexico, in September 2003.

The EU delegation to Senegal said the meeting this week here would tackle the sticky issues of farming, non-agricultural market access, cotton and the so-called "Singapore" issues - trade facilitation, transparency in government procurement, cross-border invest-mentand competition.

Ministers from about 30 WTO member states are to meet on the sidelines of an OECD conference in Paris on May 14 for further talks in the run up to the July deadline.