NEW DELHI: Talks to further liberalise the world market for agriculture, industrial goods and services may be entering its last lap at the World Trade Organization (WTO). Trade ministers from most WTO member countries, including India, are expected to converge in Geneva next month to thrash out and finalise the modalities for the rules to open up further trade in agriculture and industrial goods.

The WTO secretariat has floated a tentative date of May 19 to begin the ministerial meet. The idea seems to be to try and conclude the Doha round of negotiations by the month-end while US President George Bush is still in office.

While WTO is focusing on tying up negotiations on agriculture and non-agriculture market access (Nama) on the assumption that other areas, including services and rules, would be sorted out easily following this, India wants services to be a part of the ministerial agenda as well. A ‘signalling conference on services’ has been planned by the WTO secretariat during the ministerial and India is determined to ensure the interconnectivity between agriculture, Nama and services is not broken, an official said.

Sources told ET that while India had almost finalised its negotiating position for agriculture and Nama, it would insist on progress being made in the services negotiations simultaneously. India, which has a huge pool of skilled and semi-skilled manpower, is interested in fast-tracking the services talks which would result in increased movement of professionals from one country to another and formalise business process outsourcing.

“While WTO has provided for a signalling conference on services during the meet, we want to ensure substantial discussions and commitments take place,” the official added.

In agriculture, India is happy with the proposal to allow developing countries to identify 12-20% of their total tariff lines as special products to be subjected to less than formula cuts. However, India wants to ensure the cuts on special products are much lower than those applied on sensitive products which the developed countries will be allowed to choose.

In Nama, India is not satisfied with the reduction coefficient of 8-9 which the developed countries have proposed for themselves. “It will hardly result in any reductions for them as their tariffs are already in the range of 3-4%. To make a sizeable dent in their tariff peaks on products like textiles and leather, they have to take on higher commitments,” the official said.

The current round of multilateral trade talks, which started at Doha in November 2001, seek to put in place an umbrella agreement liberalising markets in agriculture, industrial goods and services and tightening existing rules in areas such as fisheries and anti-dumping.

18 Apr, 2008, 0302 hrs IST,Amiti Sen, TNN

Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com