Tension dogs South Asia trade meet

SAARC aims to alleviate poverty and promote trade in the region

South Asian ministers have arrived in Nepal to discuss free trade and development at a meeting dominated by fears of further tension within the region.

The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) meeting will last through to the weekend, when national leaders from the seven participating countries will arrive.

The meeting has however been overshadowed by the deteriorating relationship between its two core members - India and Pakistan - following a 13 December armed attack on the Indian parliament.

The association - set up in 1985 to promote free trade and development - has seen its progress continually hindered by political clashes within the region.

Free trade?

The ministers were expected to agree to complete the framework of a South Asian Free Trade Association by the end of the year.

The treaty is aimed at ending all trade restrictions among the seven members - India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan and the Maldives.

It has however already been postponed twice.

"All the seven countries in this region... they want the SAARC process to continue, in spite of recent tensions," Nepal's former finance minister, Dr Prakash Lohani told the BBC's World Business Report.

"In the long run, the economic transformation of this region requires that there be some understanding between India and Pakistan."

"The people in this region, they want ultimately to see a free trade area emerging from these negotiations and they want SAARC to be an institutional instrument for that purpose," he added.