India needs to do more: Lamy

World Trade Organisation Director General Pascal Lamy today said India had the highest number of horses running in the business arena.

"If you look at the agenda "" agriculture, industrial tariffs, geographical indicators, anti-dumping or trade facilitation "" all issues are important for India."

"India has a huge stake in these negotiations but this does not mean that the result has to be achieved at any price. If it was to fail "" India would be one of the victims like many developing countries but not so much as the smaller developing countries," he added.

There was now confidence in India over opening up of the economy being the right thing to do.

"India and China have to do more effort. EU and the US are being asked to bite into their existing subsidies; so India and Brazil, which have huge differences in their applied and bound tariffs, will have to see how much they can bite into their applied tariffs," Lamy, who is visiting some African countries next week, said.

Speaking at a breakfast meeting, Lamy said there was less imbalance in world trade today than before and the WTO as an organisation was going in the right direction. Citing the case of textiles, he said textile trade had been rebalanced even though some countries were not happy with China's entry into the (textiles) business.

Commenting on the April 30 deadline for agreeing on modalities, he said, "I am never optimistic or pessimistic; they (150 WTO members) have decided the deadline. I think it is doable."

"The issue is clearly political," he said, adding that the WTO trade negotiators were meeting in Geneva from April 18, after which a ministerial meeting of 25-30 key member countries was likely to be held in April end or first week of May to finalise the modalities for agriculture and industrial tariff negotiations.

The director-general got a taste of more protests, with Oxfam organising a farmers' protest. Lamy agreed to meet the farmers and convince them that their demand to keep agriculture outside WTO was not the best solution.

"I told them that in my view, WTO is what you need to change the rules and ensure fairer and less biased trade in agriculture," he said after accepting a memorandum from farmer associations.

Speaking at an interactive session with the CII, Lamy said while other areas of negotiations like services and anti-dumping were not in the limelight for the moment, they were making good progress in Geneva.

Indian industry was keen to ensure that the development objective of the Doha Round should be fully reflected in the ongoing negotiations at Geneva, said Gautam Thapar, vice-chairman and managing director, Ballarpur Industries Limited.

The chamber rejected any negotiation on remanufactured goods in the Doha Round, with members of the view that remanufactured goods could not be treated as new goods as had been proposed by some developed countries.

It was pointed out that in textiles and clothing, the issues of tariff peaks and tariff escalations existed in developed countries.

In some developed countries, tariffs on textiles and clothing ranged from zero to 32 per cent.

In case of electronics, tariffs in some developed country markets were higher than the applied tariffs in India.