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New Delhi, Jun 17 : The World Trade Organisation is likely to come out with a new revised negotiation text each on agriculture and industrial goods by this month-end to ensure a successful conclusion to the Doha Round talks that have been dragging on for seven years.
“Discussions are going on and the talks by senior officials will continue. The differences are being narrowed. Some convergence needs to be achieved before the ministerial talks expected by mid-July,” commerce secretary GK Pillai said on the sidelines of a function. Pillai added that while the ministerial, the highest decision making body of the WTO, would only be discussing industrial goods and agriculture, other issues like TRIPS, Rules, Aid for Trade, trade facilitation could be negotiated post-Ministerial but before December 2008, the deadline for completion of the Doha Round.
In a bid to prevent the talks from collapsing India, US and the European Union have held talks recently to iron out their differences. Speaking at a conference on globalisation, organised by FICCI and University of Oxford in Oxford on Monday, commerce and industry minister Kamal Nath reiterated India’s demand to the US to reduce their “trade distorting” agriculture subsidies by just one to pave way for striking an deal to complete the Doha Round. A PTI report quoting Nath said “My offer to the US is that they should reduce their subsidy by just one dollar and we have a deal.”
Claiming that the US has not been forthcoming in this regard, Nath said “they (US) say -- forget about reducing the subsidy even by a single dollar, we want to have a right to double it in the next 10 Years”
He asked the British leadership, both in the government and academia, to influence the US administration to be reasonable and agree for removal of “structural flaws” that have marked the WTO for the last 13 years.
On director-general Pascal Lamy’s keenness to hold a ministerial meeting in July, Nath said “That depends on the progress. Well, we have progress. We are better today than a month ago but there are many more milestones (to cross).”
Jut prior to arrived in UK, Nath was in the US to meet top officials including US Trade Representative Susan Schwab. The talks were held in the backdrop of the recent allegations of the US that India was preventing the successful conclusion of Doha talks. Responding to this Nath said “there is no question of India destroying any deal. There are 100 other countries which share most of our concerns.”
India had earlier described the WTO revised negotiating text on industrial goods as one designed primarily to help the developed countries gain more market access in the developing world and had called for a complete revision of the text. Nath had criticised the sharp increase in the number of square brackets in the text on industrial goods (indicating the number of points of differences) from 15 to 97 and said significant convergence achieved before taking the matter for deliberation at the Ministerial level.
On the text on agriculture, India had noted that the agriculture chair has managed to reduce the number of square brackets from 130 to 30. Officials said, “though we have some concerns, this text is good enough for further negotiations as our numbers, concerns and position is very much reflected in the revised negotiating text.” However, India is concerned that the agricultural text has proposed fewer number of products that developing nations including India can protect from unrestricted imports from agro exporting majors like Australia, US and Canada. Other developing countries including Brazil, Mexico and South Africa have also rejected the latest proposals put forward by chairs of the WTO negotiating groups on agriculture and industrial products.
Though differences in agriculture are being reduced, the problematic are is the crucial issue of livelihood concerns for poor farmers. Since India and the US are getting into election mode, the countries are finding it difficult to strike any deal that upsets their voters.
Earlier, speaking at the OECD ministerial council meeting in Paris on June 5, Lamy had said that contrary to a widespread commonplace idea, this Round was not just about developed countries “paying” in agriculture and developing countries “paying” in industrial products. “Developed countries will also make concessions in the area of industrial products, just as developing countries will also be reducing some of their tariffs in the area of agriculture,” he said.
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