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Two Singapore issues dead: India
BS Economy Bureau in New Delhi |
September 23, 2003 11:01 IST
India said two of the contentious Singapore issues of investment and competition policy were out of the future agenda of the World Trade Organisation.
Opposition by a majority of countries against the inclusion of the two issues in the work programme for trade liberalisation led the European Union, the key proponent of the issue, to agree to drop the issues at the Cancun ministerial meeting.
Commerce ministry officials said in 2001, WTO members had agreed in Doha to consider launching negotiations on the four issues at the next ministerial meeting, which concluded in Cancun last week, if there was an "explicit consensus".
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"Since there was no consensus, the legal interpretation of the Doha Declaration implies that the two issues are out of the negotiating agenda," a senior official said.
Commerce and Industry Minister Arun Jaitley said the proponents of the issue had lost the moral authority to press for negotiations on the subjects.
"In the course of the engagement (in Cancun) when the European Union wavered on the Singapore issues, the legitimacy of two issues -- investment and competition -- has been substantially dented even for the future," the minister said at a press conference on Saturday.
He was, however, less candid on the future of the issues, which resulted in the collapse of talks last Sunday, and said that the alliance of developing countries, popularly known as the G-16, would pick up the threads in Geneva.
India has all along questioned the legitimacy of including the Singapore issues, comprising investment, competition policy, trade facilitation and transparency in government procurement in the WTO programme, and has maintained that the issues do not belong to the multilateral body since they impinge on sovereignty of individual governments.
On the other hand, the European Union, Japan and South Korea have been demanding negotiations on the subjects.
Trade experts, however, said the EU was agreeable to drop two issues but may bring it back at a later date.
Others, like Anwarul Hoda, professor at Icrier and a former deputy director general of the WTO, said the issue is a grey area.
"Legally it is on the table because there is no decision on dropping them from the agenda but politically due to the strong the opposition it could be dropped," he said.