INDIA NEGOTIATING REGIONAL TRADE
PACTS WITH ASEAN, SINGAPORE, THAILAND, SOUTH AFRICA ETC.
RTAs
SHOULD NOT RAISE TRADE BARRIERS FOR NON-MEMBERS, SAYS INDIA
SEMINAR
ON WTO NEGOTIATIONS ON RTAs BEGINS
India is negotiating
a Regional Trade and Investment Area with the ASEAN, a Comprehensive
Economic Cooperation Agreement with Singapore and Preferential
Trade Agreements (PTA) / Free Trade Agreements (FTA) with Thailand,
Egypt, South Africa and Uruguay. India is already a member of
some Regional Trading Arrangements (RTAs), namely, the SAARC Preferential
Trading Arrangement, the Indo-Sri Lanka Free Trade Agreement,
the Bangkok Agreement and the recently concluded Indo-Afghanistan
Preferential Trading Agreement. India is a strong votary of the
multilateral trading system embodied in the World Trade Organisation
(WTO). At the same time, it recognises that RTAs do provide an
alternate window for faster and deeper trade liberalisation amongst
groups of countries and that RTAs are, therefore, complementary
to the multilateral trading system. However, India has concerns
that at times RTAs have led to the raising of trade barriers for
non-RTA member countries and to trade diversion.
As almost 60% of
the global trade is channelled through RTAs, it is vital to ensure
that such tendencies are addressed and to the extent possible
disciplined within the multilateral trade framework. This was
stated by Shri S.N. Menon, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Commerce
& Industry, in his inaugural address at a National Seminar
on WTO Negotiations on RTAs here this morning. The 2-day Seminar
is the first being organised by the Ministry of Commerce &
Industry, under the UNCTAD/DFID/ Department of Commerce project
on strategies & preparedness for trade and globalisation in
India.
The Doha mandate
provides an opportunity to address these concerns by clarifying
and improving disciplines and procedures under the WTO provisions
for RTAs. At the same time, the mandate also requires that development
concerns should be taken into account in these negotiations. In
this backdrop, it becomes important to consider improvements in
GATT Article XXIV as well as review mechanisms provided under
the Committee on RTAs. Discussions have taken place in the Negotiating
Group on Rules on the transparency issues, Shri Menon said.
The Seminar is being
attended by a number of experts including Shri Bhagirath Lal Das,
formerly India’s Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the
GATT; Mr. Sam Laird, Chief of the Trading System Division, UNCTAD;
Shri S. Narayanan, formerly India’s Ambassador to the WTO; Shri
Bijit Bora, Counsellor, Economic Research Division, WTO; Mr. Luis
Abugattas Majluf of the Trade Division, UNCTAD; Dr. Rajesh Chadha,
Advisor & Chief Economist, NCAER; Dr. Manoj Pant, Professor,
JNU; Prof. B Bhattacharya, Dean/IIFT; Shri A. Hoda, ICRIER; Shri
Harshvardhan Singh, Secretary-cum-Principal Advisor, TRAI; Dr.
Biswajit Dhar, Director, WTO Centre/IIFT; Shri Siddhartha Rajagopal,
Executive Director, TEXPROCIL; and Dr. Veena Jha, Coordinator/UNCTAD,
Delhi.
The Seminar aims
at focussing on specific aspects where individual non-members,
particularly India, may have been adversely affected on account
of the establishment of certain RTAs. Such adverse impact on non-members,
for instance, could arise from possible trade-diverting effects
of certain preferential rules of origin or the denial of opportunity
of fast-track procedures to non-RTA members for recognition of
sanitary & phyto-sanitary (SPS) / technical barriers to trade
(TBT) measures. Certain elements of customs valuation provisions
and trade defence mechanisms within RTA members also do not appear
to be in conformity with the existing WTO disciplines in these
areas. A discussion paper highlighting these and other concerns
regarding RTAs was circulated at the Seminar so as to obtain inputs
of the experts which would prove useful in the context of the
negotiations already underway under the Doha Work Programme for
improving and clarifying WTO provisions on RTAs through proposals
that could be put forward in the negotiations. Impact of the inclusion
of non-trade issues like labour, environment etc., in the RTAs,
could also figure in the deliberations.
