After expressing serious reservations on market access in agriculture, India on Saturday strongly advocated greater market access to goods and services in the non-agricultural sector from the developing countries for a larger share of the world trade to facilitate its structured growth.
Speaking at the WTO mini-ministerial session on 'Market Access in Non-agricultural Products', Commerce and Industry Minister Arun Jaitley said: "India attaches high priority to achieving significant increase in market access for products of interest to developing countries, such as textile and leather."
Modalities for negotiations on market access in non-agricultural products must take into account the need of the developing countries for a flexible use of tariff protection to assist their economic development as had been clearly spelt out in the Doha Declaration, he said.
New Delhi lamented that many countries have not taken into account the principle of less-than-full reciprocity in tariff reduction commitments.
Jaitley suggested that it would be better to use a simple reduction technique from bound tariff in a phased manner, which could take care of the concerns of developing countries in terms of their revenue considerations and the requirements of their sensitive employment generating sectors.
"For India, which has diverse industrial base covering many products and different levels of technology, the development aspect in working out the modalities for non-agricultural products market access would be vital," he said.
On issues relating to Special and Differential, Jaitley in his ministerial intervention refuted the criticism leveled by certain developing nations that these matters have been mainly used as a tactics rather than of any substantial interest.
"Implementation and S&D issues are integral parts of the package finalised at Doha as would be evident from a bare perusal of the Doha Ministerial Declaration," he said, cautioning that any deviation from the declaration would derail the Doha package.
India listed out the agreements on sanitary and phytosanitary measures, subsidies and countervailing measures, technical barriers to trade, dispute settlement and several other issues which were of considerable commercial importance to developing countries, yet no progress had been made on these due to resistance from the developed countries.
"We cannot accept the view that issues of concern to developing countries are of less importance than other issues or that there is a hierarchy of issues in the WTO and that implementation and the S&D issues come lower in priority," Jaitley asserted.
