In three days of talks that begin Thursday in the port city of Mombasa, trade officials from nearly 30 nations will seek to narrow differences between poor and rich nations ahead of a December WTO ministerial meeting in Hong Kong.

Poor countries want "to build concrete content on development questions, specific commitments, concrete deadlines" from richer nations on agriculture and development issues, Kenyan Trade Minister Mukhisa Kituyi said.

"Let us build more human considerations in the rules of world trade, such that the weak and vulnerable do not transfer the benefits of their labour because of poor unfair relationships (of trade)," he told reporters.

"We want to use the consultations in Kenya as an opportunity to reach out for compromise and flexibility," Kituyi said.

Rwandan Trade Minister Nshuti Paul Manesser said poor nations would not agree to anything short of fair trade, maintaining that current practices have developing countries to the brink of poverty.

"For developing countries and particular Africa ... trade is life," he said. "People don't appreciate when we say we need fair trade, we need abolition of farm subsidies. Our poverty in anchored on inbalanced trade.

"We are saying that this cannot go on, time has come that we have to have fair trade," Manesser said.

The Mombasa meeting comes a year after Kenya hosted an informal session of WTO talks in Mombasa amid hopes for a breakthrough in negotiations that had stalled due to bitter north-south disagreements, notably over agricultural subsidies.

That deadlock forced the WTO to scrap a planned end-2004 deadline for the conclusion of the Doha round, named for the Qatari capital where it was launched in November 2001.

Attempts to rescue the talks in September 2003 failed at a ministerial conference in the Mexican resort town of Cancun over disagreements on the agenda and fallout over the farm subsidies in the west.