'Need to do a better job to double Indo-US trade in next 5 yrs'

I / Washington January 30, 2010, 12:06 IST

India and the US need to do a better job to double the trade between the two countries in the next five years, a top official has said.

"We need to do a better job with our Indian partners in helping to create an enabling environment so that we can see our trade double again in the next five years," Ambassador Demetrois Marantis, Deputy US Trade Representative, said at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies here.

Noting that the US administration places enormous priority on its relationship with India, Marantis said the volume of trade between the two countries has doubled in the last five years.

The US Trade Representative, Ron Kirk, and India's Commerce Minister Anand Sharma, he said, are "breathing new life into the trade policy forum" and trying to turn it into a vehicle that both addresses the various bilateral irritants that the US has with India and also focus on things that the two countries can do together to cooperate and create a better enabling environment for trade.

"One area that we're working very closely on with our Indian counterparts is, how do we better integrate small and medium-sized enterprises, both in the US and India into the booming trade flows," Marantis said.

"They're both very underrepresented in our trade and that's one area that if we can do a better job there, we can really help to hopefully exponentially increase our trade flows with the United States and India," he said.