India scuttles US WTO move

India on Friday rejected the United States move to make changes in its commitment to reducing its subsidy on agriculture in a new draft circulated by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) secretariat to revive the international trade negotiations that had stalled at the Cancun ministerial summit last year.

Commerce Minister Kamal Nath, who flew in here from Geneva, told journalists that India's concerns over agriculture and goods trade were adequately addressed in the new text.

Even the European Union had offered to climb down with a proposal for lower subsidy for agriculture. But the US decided to bring in two key amendments to the WTO draft, which India has opposed.

One of the two amendments envisaged that the US would slow down its pace of cutting subsidies on agriculture by shifting its commitments on subsidy reduction on some agriculture items from the "green box" to the "amber box".

The second amendment meant that while developing countries like India would reduce their aggregate market support (amp) from 10 per cent of their total agriculture exports to 5 per cent, the US would go slow on its commitment to reduce its AMP from 5 per cent to zero.

Nath said he was returning to Geneva from here to resume negotiations with the US and the three other groups which had helped in the finalisation of the new WTO draft to resolve the deadlock over international trade talks.

The three other groups are: the European Union, Australia and Brazil. Nath said the new draft had taken adequate measures to protect India's agriculture. On goods, Nath said India was well in line with its commitment to bring down the peak tariff rate to 10-20 per cent.

Nath said he would negotiate with the US hard on both the issues so that appropriate bargains and concessions for India could be obtained.

He said India was playing a substantial role along with the four other groups to formulate a new text and dismissed suggestions that the Swiss objections would stall these initiatives.

Dispelling the suggestion that the Indian government was not in favour of regional trade agreements or free trade arrangements, Nath said any review of these pacts did not mean that they would be rolled back.

The government would examine in what way the concerns, if any, over them could be addressed. There were 154 trade agreements all over the world and India also was trying to get into new trade arrangements with countries, with regional groupings and also with continental groupings like Mercosur.