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"We are ready to move on things which are important to you even if there are technical problems here and there on Special and differential treatment and implementation issues," Mr Lamy said.

NEW DELHI, March 13

INDIA today made it clear that its concerns in the area of market access including less than full reciprocity in tariff reduction commitments and other special and differential treatment provisions of the developing countries as contained in the Doha Agenda of the WTO must be addressed upfront in the ongoing round of multilateral trade talks.

The Union Commerce and Industry Minister, Mr Arun Jaitley, in his interaction with the visiting Trade Commissioner, Mr Pascal Lamy, stated this. After the official-level talks, the Minister told reporters that "a wide range of bilateral and multilateral trade issues" figured in the talks in the run-up to the Cancun Ministerial meeting of the WTO scheduled to be held in September 2003.

Mr Lamy signalled the EU's willingness to move forward on a number of areas of concern to India including modalities for agriculture and non-agriculture market access, movement of natural persons under Mode 4 under services negotiations and textiles. He said the EU's commitment to the phase-out of textile quotas by the end of 2004 as mandated and noted the EU's common position with India on trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPs) and public health.

Outlining India's priorities, Mr Jaitley said that despite some broad areas of convergence, India had domestic concerns, which were dictated by social reality and cited the instance of agriculture where each product could affect the lives of millions of people dependent on agriculture for their livelihood. In the non-agricultural sector, he mentioned the autonomous process of tariff reduction whereby the peak tariffs in India had been reduced to around 25 per cent. He said the extent of reduction by the developed and developing countries would have to be different with built-in mechanism for special safeguards for developing countries like India.

Mr Lamy responded that the EU would be willing to consider the specific formula being worked out by India for the developing countries in this regard. "We are ready to move on things which are important to you even if there are technical problems here and there on Special and differential treatment and implementation issues," Mr Lamy remarked.

On textiles, it was indicated that bilateral discussions would resume shortly on new textile package covering the issues of enhanced market quotas. On the GSP issue, the Textiles Secretary, Mr S.B. Mohapatra, gave figures to show that India's exports to the EU had been hit by the GSP concession being extended to competitors. Mr Lamy refuted this by marshalling data to demonstrate that India had not lost its market share but rather its textile exports to the EU had increased and therefore the GSP matter had not affected India's trade with the EU.

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