Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 7 • Number 10 • 20th March 2003
EU And India Meet On Doha Round Issues
European Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy and his India counterpart discussed the current Doha Round trade negotiations during Lamy’s two- day visit in India on 13-14 March. Lamy made the point that trade liberalisation needs to be gradual, and not all countries can go to zero tariffs. "We know this would be very detrimental to long-term sustainable development of developing countries," he stated. However, he wished to see substantial progress at the fifth WTO Ministerial meeting in Cancun in September, and to narrow differences with India on issues up for negotiation. On agriculture, a main sticking point, Lamy said the EU needed to do more to open its market. On the other hand, he said "We, like India, do believe agriculture is different–intimately tied up with how we run our rural economy, our rural society, indeed the whole rural landscape–and that therefore there are limits to the international division of labour in agriculture". He called for more efforts on the part of India to live up to EU sanitary and phytosanitary standards in agriculture, and promised technical assistance to India in this regard. India’s Law and Commerce Minister Arun Jaitley focussed on lowering EU agricultural subsidies as the way forward, asking "To what extent can our people compete with high- subsidy economies?"Lamy and Jaitley disagreed on whether negotiations on the so-called Singapore issues of investment, competition policy, trade facilitation and government procurement should proceed after Cancun. While the EU is a major demandeur, Jaitley said that India opposes negotiations, stating that the issues should be further studied by a panel of developing country representatives.
At the meeting, Lamy pointed to India’s use of antidumping measures as a problem in the trade relations between the EU and India. "This has gone to the point that WTO consultations have unfortunately become unavoidable," he said. India, on the other hand, opposes provisions under the EU’s Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) tariff programme relating to labour rights, the protection of the environment and combating the production and trafficking of illicit drugs. At the request of India, a WTO panel was set up to examine the GSP scheme on 27 January this year (see BRIDGES Weekly, 29 January 2003).
The EU is India’s largest trading partner, and the two have set a target of EUR 25 billion of two-way trade in 2004 and EUR 50 billion by 2008.
"EU Lamy Expresses Concern Over Trade Issues With India," AP, 14 March 2003; "EU’s Lamy Woos India for Support in WTO; India Wants More Study of Singapore Issues," WTO REPORTER, 14 March 2003.