India has rejected eight proposals on non-agricultural market access, including initiatives for tariff elimination on certain industrial goods as well as trade-off measures like less protection of sensitive sectors in lieu of higher import duty cuts.
These proposals came in the backdrop of the second revised modalities text on NAMA, which did away with numbers on para 8 flexibilities and which enabled developing countries to protect certain products by not subjecting them to any cuts. In the recent talks at Geneva, Indian trade negotiators have been vehemently opposing the removal of these flexibilities.
"The recent proposals on NAMA are not in the interest of India and other developed countries. They are not acceptable," said commerce secretary Gopal Krishna Pillai.
The new proposals are seen as an attempt to break up the NAMA-11 bloc, a cluster of developing countries including India, Brazil, South Africa and Argentina. Apart from India and Argentina, these proposals could look lucrative to other NAMA-11 members.
One of the proposals, which India has been opposing, is titled "sliding rules" and allows a country to trade-off protection to its domestic sectors by agreeing to higher import duty cuts on industrial goods. India believes that the linking of formula related cut with flexibilities will lead to unwanted complexities.
This could lead to unpredictability in NAMA talks. India has also opposed 'formula plus sectorals' which is likely to force developing countries to join talks on import duty elimination of specific sectors.
India believes that these proposals are not in line with the principle of 'non-mandatory' nature of NAMA talks.
It is feared that inclusion of these latest proposals will lead to developing countries losing negotiation power in areas like Rules and trade in services under the Doha Round of world trade talks.
According to observers, the present version of the NAMA draft modalities text benefits the European Union the most and hence the economic bloc wants a quick ministerial to freeze the proposals.
WTO director general Pascal Lamy is also in favour of a quick ministerial which is a move which countries like India do not want, unless there is a broad agreement on numbers on areas like Agriculture, NAMA, as well as Rules and Services.
