By KUNA,
New Delhi : India Thursday expressed hope that the World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks would restart in near future and that the country would constructively engage at the WTO to move the Doha Development Round to a successful conclusion.
“The government is hopeful that a new process will start soon,” Indian Minister of Commerce Industry Kamal Nath said while addressing a press conference on the outcome of the recently concluded WTO Ministerial Conference at Geneva, here today.
“The coming months would see attempts at overcoming the current impasse. India stands committed to constructively engage at the WTO to move the Doha Development Round to a successful conclusion,” Kamal Nath said.
“The primary objective of the Doha Round is to put the development dimension of international trade on centre stage. While there would always be commercial interests guiding trade, these interests cannot take primacy over the livelihood interests of billions of poor and vulnerable farmers of the developing world.
In the context of the current food crisis and the abnormal rise in food prices, it has become all the more important to preserve and protect the livelihood security of poor farmers and the long term food security of developing nations, the Minister said, adding, “In view of the subsistence nature of farming in developing countries and the need to insulate the poor and vulnerable farmers of developing countries from the shock of large tariff reductions, the instruments of Special Products and Special Safeguard Mechanism (SSM) were built into the Doha mandate.” He said the lack of consensus on SSM was not an issue affecting only India. It affected more than 100 of the least developed and developing countries.
“We have more than 300 million people living on less than one usd a day. We argued that while India was prepared to be constructive and reasonable, it could simply not accept any solution that would pose a serious threat to the livelihoods of its subsistence farmers”, he said.
The SSM was not the only issue on which progress could not be made. There were several other important developing country issues like cotton, preference erosion, tropical products on which discussions were not held. The major developed countries also wanted the developing countries to agree to a restrictive anti concentration clause and to take part in Sectorals in the industrial goods area, Kamal Nath pointed out.