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'India's stand on WTO Doha meet untenable'

India's continuing opposition to the expansion on the World Trade Organisation's agenda for the coming Doha ministerial meet is untenable, say experts.

Given that India is not part of any of the emerging regional trade groupings, WTO is the right forum for an ambitious round of multilateral negotiations to protect the nation's interests, said experts at a seminar -- The new WTO round -- in New Delhi on Friday.

"India is not part of any of the emerging regional trade blocks and faces the risk of being squeezed out in preferential treatment," said Anwar-ul Hoda, former director general of WTO and economic adviser at Indian Council for Research in International Relations.

While expressing support for India and several developing countries' stand of seeking implementation of pending issues from the Uruguay Round, experts speaking on various aspects of free trade maintained that the contentious issues are better dealt with in the Doha negotiations.

In view of the emerging regional groupings there is need for India to go in for an ambitious round of talks at Doha to pull down barriers and erode preferences, said Hoda.

Negotiations are already on for expanding the Euro-Mediterranean Free Trade Area membership from 15 countries to 28 within the next decade. In the case of Americas, a move is afoot to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement to include South America.

In Asia too a regional grouping is emerging with Japan shedding its reluctance and negotiating with Singapore and South Korea for a free trade zone, which may see the expansion of ASEAN trade zone.

Bibek Debroy of the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies felt it is incongruous for India to oppose a new round of talks.

"The new round should not be mixed with new subjects. India's position is slightly untenable. It seems to be public posturing in an internal sense."

The economists lay part of the blame for this on the wrongly perceived image of WTO among the organised industrial sector, agriculture and the small scale industrial sector which attribute all the ills facing them to competition because of globalisation.

The experts strongly felt that with agriculture and services already a part of the WTO negotiation agenda, India should actively go for inclusion of investment and competition as suggested by the draft declaration.

"The best bet for India is to seek that pending issues should be folded into the scope of negotiations with several of the implementation issues still unsettled," said Hoda, highlighting several items which required modification.

According to Manoj Pant of Liberty Institute, a public policy research organisation, India needs to do its homework and "generate its own material instead of relying on study material from overseas."

It is the lack of awareness about the issue that is leading to India wrongly adopting a stand of keeping out of a new round of negotiations.

While not a disaster, the failure of the WTO negotiations would spell the slow decline of an international trading system that would not be good for developing countries like India, said the experts.

"To ward against this it is essential that dissent should not become a barrier to negotiations," said Hoda.

Indo-Asian News Service

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