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WTO meet falters on import duties cut
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| By£ºPRIYA RANJAN DASH
¡¡2005-7-15 9:20:28 |
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DALIAN (CHINA): Key WTO players meeting here informally at their trade
ministers¡¯ level failed on Wednesday to hammer out a convergence of views on how
to go about cutting import duties on industrial products.
But by a
last-minute tactical intervention, India against heavy odds, managed to keep
alive its proposal on a method for cutting import duties in the ongoing round of
WTO negotiations.
While a Pakistan plan got wide acceptance as a basis
for further negotiation, the so-called ABI proposal, sponsored by Argentina and
Brazil besides India, was on the verge of being given a burial. But India did a
quick impact analysis and on finding that the effect of the Pakistani method
wouldn¡¯t be very different from the ABI proposal, it suggested that both be
taken as the basis for further talks in Geneva.
Before the intervention
by commerce minister Kamal Nath that saved the day, rich and poor countries
alike had disfavoured India¡¯s idea of using a modified Swiss mathematical
formula for cutting import tariffs, taking the average of each country¡¯s WTO
bound tariff rates as the coefficient.
The proposal from the developed
countries for using a "simple Swiss formula"had also been overwhelmingly
rejected by the entire developing world. But the Pakistan proposal for using two
coefficients ¡ª one for the developing countries based on their average tariffs
and the other for the developed countries based on their average tariffs ¡ª had
received wide support.
Sensing the sudden death of the ABI proposal,
Nath made two critical moves just before the chairman of the meeting, Hong Kong
minister Jhon Tsang, was to sum up the proceedings and close the session.
First, Nath sought to win the backing of the least developed countries
(LDCs) by announcing that India was working on a plan to unilaterally give
duty-free access to LDC products to its vast market and this could happen even
before trade ministers of all WTO members meet in Hong Kong on December 13-18.
Second, Nath suggested that most countries had not studied in detail the
Pakistan plan, but since it "sounds OK", that along with the ABI proposal could
form the basis of further talks so as to ready a method of cutting duties by the
Hong Kong meeting.
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(Editor:Farah Song) (From:TIMES NEWS NETWORK)
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