India: Ready to work on farm draft text at WTO

Ready to work on farm draft text at WTO: India

New Delhi, Aug. 3 (PTI): India can accept the recent WTO draft on agriculture as a basis for further talks in the Doha Round, but proposals on industrial goods were "fundamentally flawed and essentially biased", a senior government official said Thursday.
Experts in the Commerce Ministry have started work on preparing response to the two drafts, which will be placed before the World Trade Organisation in Geneva when it resumes negotiations in September after vacations.
"Our officials are reading the draft texts. It is a complicated text with a lot of legal connotations. We are trying to decipher what the texts have and how we can negotiate on them when the talks resume in September," Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Rahul Khullar, said at a CII seminar on WTO.
He said while the agricultural text offered possibilities that can be built upon, the Non-Agricultural Market Access text "is unacceptable".
The WTO circulated on July 17 separate drafts on agriculture and NAMA prepared by the respective chairs - Crawford Falconer and Don Stephenson.
The new proposal envisages European Union cutting its highest tariffs by as much as 73 per cent as against its offer of 70 per cent. It also requires India to lower duties on industrial products to an average of about 12 per cent.
The WTO mediators also proposed that US farm subsidies be capped at $16.4 billion, compared to the $17 billion Washington has offered. The EU would have to cut its farm import tariffs by about 64 per cent.
Commerce and Industry Minister, Kamal Nath, had earlier described the agriculture draft as a "good basis for further negotiations."