The Hindu : National : India hopeful of consensus before WTO meeting

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Apr 18, 2005

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National

India hopeful of consensus before WTO meeting

Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI: : India is optimistic that the developed and developing countries will arrive at a consensus on the modalities of negotiations over contentious issues such as agriculture, services and non-agriculture market access (NAMA) before the WTO Ministerial meeting in Hong Kong in December this year.

"Preparation of specific commitments by each member country with respect to agriculture, non-agriculture market access and services is under way and we hope for some consensus on the modalities before the Ministerial meeting in Hong Kong during December 13-18," the Commerce Secretary, S.N. Menon, told newspersons on the sidelines of the convocation ceremony of the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade (IIFT) here on Sunday.

Mr. Menon said that the developed nations had not yet fully met the commitments made during the 1995 Uruguay round of negotiations and the recent developments in the multilateral trading scenario left no scope for complacency by India and other developing countries.

In his address as chairman of IIFT, Mr. Menon said while the main role of the World Trade Organisation was to facilitate international trade and simultaneously create an environment for its expansion, the inclusion of new areas like the competition policy, foreign direct investment (FDI), environment and labour standards and transparency in government procurement was distracting the WTO ."Tariff escalation has affected the market access of high-value processed products from developing countries. Product regulations and standards have emerged as potential barriers to exports of developing countries. There is also a strong feeling among developing countries that these new issues will only benefit developed countries and further aggravate the imbalance and inequity which exists in current negotiations," Mr. Menon said.

The chairman and chief mentor of Infosys Technologies, N.R. Narayana Murthy, in his convocation address, said India should create greater openness to trade to spur growth, especially as the country was still counted among the most restrictive nations by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

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