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A letter has been sent to WTO head Pascal Lamy by India's Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath summarising his views of the stalled Doha Round of trade talks.
In the letter, Nath has defended India’s firm stance on the agricultural special safeguard mechanism (SSM) a controversial trade tool that would allow countries to protect domestic producers from sudden import surges or price declines by temporarily raising tariffs. The SSM has been credited with triggering the collapse of the most recent round of world trade talks, held in Geneva in July, when trade ministers met to make progress towards a deal to conclude Doha Round.
But he argued that attributing the breakdown of the July ‘mini-ministerial’ talks to the SSM “unfairly framed the status of the negotiations in a manner where it appeared that India was holding up the SSM whereas the reality is that it was the US which could not agree to an appropriate SSM.”
Nath further maintained that the SSM could not rightfully be blamed for the more recent failure to strike a deal in the intensive negotiations among a smaller group of capital-based officials from seven economic powerhouses -- Australia, Brazil, China, the EU, India, Japan and the US, collectively known as the ‘G-7'.
“While the G-7 meeting had been convened to discuss other equally important unresolved issues concurrently, there was absolutely no movement on any of them,” Nath said.
In addition to the SSM, the G-7 talks, which took place in Geneva in mid-September, also covered cotton, tariff simplification, sensitive products, new tariff rate quota’s (TRQs), blue box head room and the green box of non-trade distorting subsidies.
On potential cuts in US cotton subsidies, Nath argued that “India is the second largest exporter of cotton and there are millions of cotton farmers in India…and no solution on cotton can be devised which does not conform fully to our expectations.”
Signing off on a more positive note, Nath stated that India “is committed to an early and successful conclusion of the Doha Round. We shall spare no efforts in trying to conclude modalities, as soon as possible, preferably within the year.” (Source: ICTSD)
October 6, 2008
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