Commerce and industry minister Suresh Prabhu will represent India at the meet

India is expected to face pressure to begin talks to open up cross-border digital trade and also ease investment norms in a crucial two-day meeting of trade ministers of key countries in Marrakech beginning Monday. Trade ministers of many developed and developing countries, including India, are meeting on October 9-10 for a mini-ministerial of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ahead of the ministerial conference in Argentina later in the year.

Commerce and industry minister Suresh Prabhu will represent India at the meet whose outcome would define the broad contours for the December meet. India is likely to reiterate its demand for a permanent solution for public stockholding (PSH) of food grains and the continued relevance of the Doha Development Agenda. The previous ministerial conference in Nairobi in 2015 had culminated in a divided opinion on the issue.

The Doha round seeks to put in place a global pact to reduce trade barriers. As part of the G-33, India floated a revised paper on PSH proposing the inclusion of procurement of foodstuff at minimum support price and their distribution at subsidised rates in the global rules for agriculture in order to safeguard the interests of low-income resource-poor farmers and ensure food security to the poor.

Delhi’s concerns are not unfounded as developed countries like the US, the EU and Japan and a few developing ones like Singapore are not only opposed to these but also want new subjects like e-commerce, investment facilitation, fisheries and MSMEs (micro, small and medium enterprises) to brought in the ambit of WTO's multilateral discourse.