Ministers from 27 nations met in Lima, Peru's capital, on Monday to discuss methods of regularizing international migration, Peru's Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

The International Ministerial Conference for Developing Nations with International Migrant Flows, aims to create agreements and recommendations together with developed nations which receive the greatest number of migrants, according to the statement.

"Informality is one of the central characteristics of today's migration," Peru's Foreign Minister Oscar Maurtua said in an opening speech. "And for this reason thousands of men and women from poor countries are the object of ill-treatment, abuse and illegal trafficking."

The conference, which ends on Tuesday, has brought together officials from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa and east Europe -- the regions witnessing a total emigrant flow of more than 1 million people each year.

The conference is expected to reach an agreement called the Lima Declaration, which will be an important premise for a UN migration and development conference due in September in New York.

Because of the large number of emigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean, some nations from these regions receive as much as 10 percent of their gross national product in remittances, according to data from the Inter-American Development Bank.

(Xinhua News Agency May 16, 2006))