Reviving Doha Round: India to attend G7 meet

In a bid to revive the Doha trade negotiations, India’s chief trade negotiator, Rahul Khullar, will tomorrow take part in a meeting of senior officials of the Group of Seven (G-7) countries being hosted here by the United States.

Ahead of this one-day meeting, senior trade officials from the United States, Brazil, Australia and the European Union discussed tentative proposals by Brazil and Australia to break the deadlock in the Doha Development Agenda negotiations, which collapsed due to unbridgeable differences over the special safeguard mechanism (SSM) for developing countries.

The SSM intends to curb unforeseen surges in farm imports, especially products that will be subjected to zero cuts.

The United States, along with other farm exporting countries, insist that developing countries must accept a high threshold limit for the SSM mechanism.

In sharp contrast, developing countries, led by India and China, maintain that they should be entitled to use

the SSM if imports cross 115 per cent over a three-year period Senior officials from the US, the EU, Japan, India, China, Brazil and Australia will meet “to test” some new ideas formulated by Brazil and Australia, according to trade negotiators.

The Brazil-Australia proposal would present a different framework from what was discussed at the July mini-ministerial meeting.

Meanwhile, senior negotiators from the US, Australia and Brazil have suggested that the ideas discussed by the three countries will be tested in Wednesday’s meeting.

The July meeting broke down because India and China refused to accept a safeguard trigger that went above 115 per cent, while the United States and Australia were unwilling to go below 140 per cent.

Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim spoke to Indian Commerce Minister Kamal Nath last Friday to seek New Delhi’s support for a compromise, trade negotiators said. The Brazilian minister underscored the need to find an immediate solution to the safeguard mechanism so that the failing Doha talks can be put back on track.

Nath is slated to meet EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson on Friday in London. Besides the special safeguard mechanism, senior officials will have to get over at least three other roadblocks to reach agreement on final modalities — cotton, farm tariff simplification and expansion of tariff-rate quotas for industrialised countries.