Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 14 • Number 27 • 21st July 2010
Indian Official Hints at Flexibility on Sectorals in NAMA Talks
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A top Indian trade official suggested this week that New Delhi might agree to make steep cuts on some industrial sectors - a key demand of Washington as the price for breaking the deadlock in the Doha Round talks. India long pointed to the negotiating mandate’s explicit statement that participation in such “sectoral” liberalisation initiatives would be voluntary.
“The sectorals will not go away. They will stay there. If all that I can say is no, it won’t be intelligent,” said Rahul Khullar, commerce secretary, at a meeting organised by an Indian industry lobby group in New Delhi on Tuesday.
According to a report in the Economic Times newspaper, Khullar noted that there were several products which could be allowed entry to the Indian free of import duties, since there was no significant competing domestic industry.
Even for some sectors where imports would compete with local products, he said, it was far from clear that Indian manufacturers would be unable to compete. “We have proved time and again that we can be competitive. We cannot cower in sheer fear that something bad is going to happen (if India participates in the sectorals),” he said.
He called for input from Indian industry about which products required protection, and which could withstand unfettered competition.
“It is not that all auto components or all chemicals need to be protected. Some do and some don’t,” he said, referring to two of Washington’s priority sectors in the NAMA negotiations. The extent to which developing countries participating in a sectoral initiative would be able to shield some products in that sector from the deep tariff cuts remains to be determined.
Sectorals were not addressed at a recent meeting of the WTO’s negotiating group on non-agricultural market access, known as NAMA (see related story, this issue). The topic has been so divisive that the chair of the group has set it aside for the time being to allow negotiators to devote their efforts to those areas in which movement is more feasible.
ICTSD reporting; “India may turn flexible at WTO sectoral talks,” ECONOMIC TIMES, 21 July 2010.
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what are we trying to achieve here Planetary sustainability and balance or Indian self interest?
Those who believed that Indian leadership and bureaucracy is amendable even to unfair pressure have been proved to be right.