Whats being negotiated at WTO? The refusal by rich nations to move beyond giving a mere assurance to address Indias concerns resulted in the collapse of WTO talks early Friday morning (India time), but top government officials said there is still scope to close the deal thrashed out in Bali by the end of the year. Questioning the claims made by some of the rich nations that India did not offer solutions, the officials said, WTO director general Roberto Azevedo contacted commerce & industry minister Nirmala Sitharaman last Sunday , two days after Indias ambassador Anjali Prasad told members that the government had decided to link the final trade facilitation agreement to addressing Indias concerns on food security . On Monday afternoon, Azevedo sent a formal proposal, suggesting a month-by-month work programme to address Indias concerns, which went beyond what he had suggested to Sitharaman in Sydney a few dy calculation from 1986-88 to current market prices. The third alternative was to index the 1986-88 price to current levels and the fourth was to have a permanent “peace clause“ so that there was no challenge at WTO even if the limit was breached. The second option was to agree to the trade facilitation pact with peace clause until a permanent solution is found. “We asked for this with the clear understanding that a so lution had to be found by December 31,“ a senior officer explained, adding that a draft text of the new framework was also handed over to the WTO boss. As the Thursday deadline neared, the US and others sought to put pressure on the government with secretary of state John Kerry raising the issue during his meetings in the Capital on Thursday . The government was, however, had a clear strategy of negotiating in Geneva. DOHA ROUND In 2001, WTO members had agreed to launch negotiations on... WHAT HAPPENED IN BALI? Over the years, WTO realised that no one was willing to concede any ground and had in fact begun to focus on free trade agreements to boost exports. So, in Bali, members agreed to settle for a smaller agenda to rebuild confidence in the multilateral trade body. There were only three sets of issues on the table Trade facilitation | The idea is to ease customs rules so that goods can move easily across borders. This will help large exporters such as the US, EU and China, especially in accessing land-locked African and poor countries with poor infrastructure Agriculture | India is pushing for a change in rules to ensure that its grain procurement programme and minimum support price for rice and wheat are not impacted by a subsidy cap of 10% of the value of production. It has argued that the formula is flawed since subsidy is calculated based on the average price for 1986-88, when prices were up to six times lower. There were other issues such as using unused export quotas, which was being pushed by Brazil LDC issues | The idea is to correct the gaps in the rules as the poor countries are adversely impacted Agriculture | Industrial goods | Developing US & EU were to countries were expected to reduce reduce subsidies customs duty -while the developed in return for import world was to slash duties on certain duty cuts by developing products -where it was abnormally high countries despite the average rate being moderate Services | In return Development for cutting tariffs on issues | Poor and industrial goods and developing countries allowing FDI, countries wanted some of the such as India had hoped to get problems related to existing easier visa rules WTO agreements sorted out
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 11:06:26 +0000