MOSCOW, April 22. /ITAR-TASS/. Five Caspian littoral countries - Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan - favour the peaceful and stable development in the region, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said.

“The meeting is the preparation for the 4th summit,” Lavrov said at a ministerial conference on Tuesday.

“The leaders of our countries pay much attention to the Caspian problem,” he said.

“Such approach is supported by our countries’ public,” Lavrov said.

“In recent years we’ve succeeded in creating a cantractual and legal groundwork and solving all problems on an equal basis and account of the interests of each other ,” he said.

After the 3rd Caspian summit in 2010 the leaders set concrete tasks. “On the Caspian legal status we set the task to work out parameters for waste disposal in the water area, on security -  to start implementing agreements to maintain the Caspian Sea as a water area of peace and security, on fisheries - to create a mechanism for imposing a moratorium on sturgeon catching. Today we’ll determine major trends for further work,” Lavrov said.

The Ministers Sergei Lavrov, Elmar Mamadyarov, Javad Zarif, Yerlan Idrisov, and Rashid Meredov will discuss the programme and agenda of the summit and its draft final documents.

“They will analyse the work done by the experts of the five littoral countries in what concerns fulfilling decision of the previous Caspian summit (held in Baku in 2010) to design a new legal status of the Caspian sea that would match the new reality, as well as decisions in the areas like security and counteraction to common challenges, nature conservation, maintenance and rational utilization of aquatic biological resources, prevention and elimination of emergency situations, and a number of others,” a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

Moscow believes that regular conferences of foreign ministers of the Caspian littoral nations offer an efficient mechanism of collaboration in the region.

“This format relies on a high level of trust and mutual understanding among the constituent parties on the key items of the Caspian agenda and it enables them to tap commonly acceptable solutions to the most complicated issues on the basis of consensus and in the atmosphere of friendship and good-neighborliness,” the spokesman said.

“Commitment of all the five countries to the principle of maintaining the Caspian Sea as a water area of peace and security as well as to the buildup of the potential of mutual beneficial cooperation in a variety of spheres has laid reliable groundwork for such contacts,” he said.

“Moscow is firmly committed to all the existing agreements related to the Caspian Sea and it speaks in favor of a further intensification of dialogue among the littoral states,” the spokesman said.