Manmohan Singh leaves for St Petersburg later this week to attend the G8 summit of industrialised nations with a heavy agenda.
NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh leaves for St Petersburg later this week to attend the G8 summit of industrialised nations with a heavy agenda that would include meetings with Presidents George Bush and Vladimir Putin.
Singh is also expected to hold talks with some of the other leaders of G8 that comprises Britain Japan, France, Germany, Italy and Canada on the margins of the July 15-17 summit, whose main agenda is global energy security. At their talks, Singh and Bush are likely to apprise each other of the steps taken by their countries to take forward the nuclear deal.
International trade would also be in focus during the summit as the G8 leaders are expected to make efforts to break the deadlock over the Doha round of WTO negotiations. The recent round of negotiations held in Geneva ended in an impasse on the issues of the US and other industrialised nations cutting domestic subsidy for agriculture and developing nations reducing tariff on industrial goods. WTO chief Pascal Lamy is expected to be at St Petersburg during the summit.
Leaders from the European Union (EU), South Africa, China and Brazil, besides India, are special invitees to attend an "outreach meeting’’ with G8 leaders, who held their meeting at Gleneagles, Scotland, from July 6-8 last year and discussed steps to check climate change and reduce poverty in Africa. The Gleneagles summit had been held despite the serial terrorist bomb attacks in London on July 7. The controversy arising from Iran’s reported nuclear ambitions is also expected to come up at the G8 meeting.
Despite some bickerings, the G8 is reportedly planning a massive expansion of nuclear power generation in their respective countries and help developing countries that shun nuclear bombs to embark on similar programmes. An "action plan’’ for global energy security is expected to be adopted at the summit, envisaging a network of nuclear fuel plants in G8 countries and sale of reactors to developing countries. Education and disease prevention are also on the agenda of the summit.
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