Islamabad: Pakistan's Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri today (Jan 02, 2004) raised hopes that a South Asian free trade pact could be signed at the seven-nation summit starting this weekend.

Kasuri told a seminar discussing the South Asian Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA) that the mood of Foreign Ministers meeting to fine-tune the draft pact was buoyant.

"I have just come back from the meeting where there was a great degree of warmth and candour and friendship," Kasuri said of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Council of Ministers' meeting.

"If we proceed in the same manner in the second session (tomorrow) maybe our heads will be, or the summit will be, ready to sign the SAFTA agreement".

It is hoped that a signing of SAFTA would lead to a free trade zone in South Asia, home to one-fifth of the world's population and nearly half its poor.

A draft agreement, drawn up in Kathmandu in November, calls for trade of 5,600 goods under a concessional tariff structure of 10 to 25 per cent.

Senior bureaucrats of SAARC member countries India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka met earlier this week to negotiate SAFTA. Pakistan's Foreign Secretary Riaz Kokhar said difficulties raised by smaller less-developed countries had yet to be resolved.