Cape Town, May 11 (ANI): Union External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee has reached Cape Town to participate in the fifth meeting of the India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) Ministerial Trilateral Commission, which is beginning today.

South Africa's Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma and Brazil's Minister of External Relations Celso Amorim will join Mukherjee in the one-day commission meeting, which is taking place in the small town of Somerset West, outside Cape Town.

The discussion of the meeting will focus on India's efforts to strengthen strategic trilateral political, economic and trade ties between India, Brazil and South Africa.

The meeting coincides with the first IBSA Joint Naval Exercises (IBSAMAR) off the Cape coast, which started on May 5 and will end on May 16.

According to the Indian High Commission, the IBSA Dialogue Forum, since its inception in 2003, has made significant progress in providing an influential international platform from where the development challenges of the South could be prioritized and the marginalisation of developing countries countered.

Global multilateral issues such as Global Governance, the Millennium Development Goals, International Trade, Intellectual Property Rights, Climate Change, Biodiversity, Sustainable Development, Racism and Xenophobia, Gender, Disarmament and Non-proliferation, Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy and regional political issues of global importance will be discussed in the meeting.

Mukherjee and his Brazilian and South African colleagues will also reflect on preparations for the third IBSA Summit that is scheduled to take place in New Delhi on October 15.

In the last IBSA Summit in 2007, the Heads of State and Government set a target of increasing IBSA intra trade to 15 billion dollars by 2010. (ANI)